From conversations about surveying, data, engaging staff, talking with doctors, dealing with senior leaders, no subject about helping patients understand and navigate their relationship with healthcare is off-limits.
Joe lives by the motto, Always Serious, Never Somber. He thinks that because the work is hard, the journey is long, and the stakes are high, one must embrace the joy or lose the fire necessary to fuel the passion.
He will acknowledge that he is easily distracted if asked about music, his dogs or the Chicago Cubs.
Even organizations that imagine themselves as collaborative seem to drag people to the woodshed for beatings when scores decline. Why?
Lessons on patient experience are all around us, even in places that aren’t obvious.
When setting foundational work covering all employees, organizations are not always structured to be successful.
It may be hard to believe, but healthcare has low self-esteem and it is preventing it from improving its experience.
While a commitment to being nice is laudatory, it is often a slippery concept that is difficult to attain.
While AI can be a boon, without attentive oversight, its use can be misguided, illegal, or off-putting.
Question construction seems deceptively easy. Questions that provide actionable results require attention to detail.
People obsess with survey length when they should be focused on survey value and reducing the obstacles to participation.
Before setting out to create and execute a survey, one should determine if it is the right move or just an obvious wrong move.
“Be nice” cannot be the objective of a successful service action plan because it lacks the substance required to be a useful action plan.
Part of your task is convincing to leadership how hard lasting change is, even as you convince staff how easy it is to change.
Some see the pursuit of perfection as an effort to provide crystal clarity, but this often makes things less clear.
We know why we fail, but why can’t we avoid those points of failure?
Before we get upset in the defensiveness of others, let us understand our own defensiveness.
Here are the questions you should answer before asking other people survey questions.
Messaging from leaders that failures will be punished and successes will be forgotten underscores why so much PX work flounders.
The road to data hell often begins with, “Just run a simple survey to verify compliance.”
Of all the organizational options for PX, what are the best options in my option? Here they are.
Where organizations put PX will define what PX looks like and what they will spend their time doing. Choose wisely.
PX can be marginalized because systems don’t know how to integrate it.
We need to be smarter, but we also need to hold those who seek to inform us to higher standards.
How people process large numbers affects how they process healthcare outcomes and decisions.
One big gap between clinicians and patients is how they understand and process math. This failure to communicate can lead to suboptimal outcomes.
We say we are not perfect and don’t expect perfection, even as we seem to demand it in everything.
While it feels like everyone loves us or hates us, that is not the reality of survey data.
Too often hospitals fail to use the right language to connect clinicians and staff with service and experience work.
In all the talk about providing unique experiences to patients, one should ask if this is what patients really want.
While we judge our patients for their misconceptions, we should spare a moment to evaluate our own misconceptions.
Your desire to use patient comments to motivate and inspire starts with picking the right ones.
Reviewing physician comments through patient eyes.
People often put more stock in patient comments than survey data, but often in the wrong ways.
If you don’t target specific messages in your praise and critique, don’t assume that your team is picking up on the nuance.
Everyone knows that attention is currency, but often people forget that the kind of attention is important.
The key to effective communication is not empathy, but compassion.
If you want better communication with your patients, you need to be the change you want.
Connecting patient and employee data contain logical issues the strain the ability to find simple connections.
The crossroads between patient and employee satisfaction is a very rocky.
If transactional relationships are ruining healthcare, then transactional surveying ain’t gonna help.
Setting goals against benchmarks is important. Choosing what sort of benchmark is important, but often not fully considered.
How a change in how we approach enemies, friends and lovers has made healthcare less helpful for patients and satisfying for clinicians.
Not understanding the omnipresence of statistical error can lead to troubling consequences.
On on-going series exploring the intersection of statistics and common understanding to highlight gaps in assumptions and understanding.
Attempts to create hard measures for soft feelings confuse respondents and deceive themselves.
Tips on how to train staff on PX without falling into the same old zero-sum traps.
Three things that may not seem to challenge the attention that service demands in an organization, but absolutely do.
NPS is a popular way to report data and too often it confuses more than it enlightens.
Leaders need to understand our patient experience vision if they can support our staff to deliver it.
Succeeding with service requires a slightly different mindset than succeeding with clinical quality or other elements in hospital operations.
A list of valuable things to have at the ready, when you embark on any data exploration.
PX Matters with Joseph Snipp 