Patient Experience Summit Re-cap: Tuesday, May 17

Thank you for participating in Tuesday’s sessions at the seventh annual Patient Experience: Empathy + Innovation Summit. We enjoyed sharing our ideas, and more importantly – hearing from you.

As the Patient Experience Summit wraps up Wednesday, it picks up with, with several opportunities for you to hear from national leaders and to participate in discussions that will help you amplify empathy.

The Patient Experience Summit has brought together patient experience leaders, healthcare CEOs, innovators, nursing leaders, policy makers, major stakeholders and industry experts. Nearly 2,000 attendees gathered to discuss best practices, network with peers, learn innovative solutions and hear new insights into the patient experience. We’re committed to not just the patient or caregiver experience – but also the human experience. We hope we provided you with both strategic insight and tactical advice on how organizations can frame patient experience to drive improvement and differentiation in your organizations. Thank you for being part of this incredible discussion.

Tuesday’s Highlights:

Who Cares
Ronald Wyatt, MD, MHA: “What is care? Care is coordinated, activating and personalized. At the foundation, care is dignity, compassion and respect. If you care, you must:

• Ask what matters to me
• Ask how to serve me best
• Talk to me
• Listen to me
• Say thank you to me
• Apologize to me
• Do not hurt me”

Meeting the Patient Where They Are
Patti Substelny, MLIR, Patient: “I have a disease, but I am not sick. Very soon after our marriage, my husband and I asked my doctor what we should be thinking about having children. My physician said we better give up that ghost. He not only didn’t meet me where I was; he failed me. He was trying to treat a diagnosis – not his patient.”

The Patient Experience: Past, Present and Future
Moderator Adrienne Boissy, MD, MA, discussed with Toby Cosgrove, MD, Chief Executive Officer and President, Cleveland Clinic, about where the field of patient experience has come from and where it’s going.

Dr. Cosgrove: “Patient experience is a journey and we have talked about the quality of healthcare as three things: Clinical experience, physician experience and emotional experience. Frankly, I think the part that we have the biggest opportunity to improve is the emotional experience. Patients who come into the hospital may be terrified. They desire to have as much of that anxiety dealt with as possible and they need to be treated as human beings. All of us understand how we would like to be treated… We need to address the burnout and the stress of our caregivers to continue to journey.”

Transform Patient Care with Technology & Gratitude Innovation
Andrew Horn: “Want to be 25 percent happier? When you wake up in the morning and go to bed at night, acknowledge three things you are thankful for and three things you are looking forward to.”

Cultural Engagement to Transform the Experience
James Merlino, MD: “Everyone goes into healthcare for the right reason, for the higher purpose. But we tend to forget about this. In the hamster wheel of everyday activities, we forget why we’re here. When you think about the pressure of our workforce, record levels of stress, crazy levels of burnout – it’s hard to think about this and do what we do, which is to take care of our fellow human beings and do it in a way that is compassionate.”

“It only takes 56 seconds or less to learn something about someone and make a connection. Surely we have 56 sections to spare. It’s what I want when I see a physician.”

Will the Health Professions Survive? Only if We Connect Better with Patients
Three leading empathy advocates discussed how technological innovation and the drive for efficiency have led to a concerning global deficit in empathy and compassion in medicine today.

Moderator: Helen Riess, MD: “Patients are more informed. The knowledge gap has shrunken dramatically because they can look up anything online and become partners in their healthcare. Technology is both a blessing and a curse. It’s leading to burnout and attrition at rates we have never seen before. The relationship between patients and caregivers can be fragile, unformed.”

Brian Hodges, MD, PhD, FRCPC: “Some have asked if there will be health professionals in the future. All healthcare can be diagnosed with three clusters: knowledge based, skills based and relationship based. If we don’t hold on to the third, we may not be needed at all.”

Richard Levin, MD: “The American Diabetes Association has indicated the cost of treating diabetes is 245 billion dollars in the U.S. and is expected to increase by 128 percent within next 10-15 years… One of the most available solutions is empathy and compassion. Healthcare outcomes can be improved by relating to a patient in this most important way.

End of Life – Compassionate Conversations and Care
Daniel Diaz: “Media and others may assume when you apply for this end of life medication, you give up. When you have cancer, you fight. The medication simply provides them piece of mind. By having that medication, the fear of losing control vanishes. Brittany held the trump card the tumor could not defeat. To a terminally ill individual, death is not failure. Suffering would have been failing.”

“One voice can make a difference; Brittany’s voice truly did.”

Professional Consequences of Physicians’ Personal Well-being
Tait Shanafelt, MD: “If I told you we had a system issue that limited access to care, threated quality to care, eroded patient satisfaction and was impacting at least half of the physicians and nurses and therefore affecting at least half of the patients, you would quickly initiate the SWAT team… That’s precisely what we have. And yet we have not responded the way we would respond to other system-level factors affecting care.”