2023 Patient Experience Summit

7:15am – 8:00am

Conference Registration & Networking Breakfast

8:00am – 8:15am

Chairperson’s Opening Remarks

8:15am – 9:00am

Patient Experience: What it is and Why it’s Vital for Success

In the digital age, the patient experience has become more complex but also more critical as it relates to patient retention, reimbursement, and patient satisfaction. To thrive in today’s healthcare environment, it’s important to look at the patient journey when aiming to improve the patient experience. Improving patient experiences requires looking at the entire healthcare ecosystem. Patients communicate with their healthcare providers through a variety of channels, while interacting with a wide range of departments and individuals along the way. As the patient experience evolves, it’s important to expand how you are listening to your patients to close gaps and make continuous improvements. This session will provide a holistic view of patient experience and why it is important.

9:00am – 9:45am

Charting the Future of Patient Experience

No one could have predicted all that has happened in healthcare recently. Virtual care skyrocketed, with both patients and providers embracing it. While care at a distance has been a necessity, is it now becoming what patients want and expect. Since COVID-19, 60 percent of patients want to use technology more for their healthcare and 9 out of 10 patients said the quality of care was “as good or better” than before COVID-19.

So how can healthcare organizations build on this momentum? There is great promise to look at this unprecedented time in healthcare as an opportunity to do better. The opportunities are vast across the care continuum to give patients what they need, where and when they need it, with the right tools to bring it all together. This session will explore delivering the kinds of services patients want and need and the future of patient experience.

9:45am – 10:15am

Networking & Refreshments Break

10:15am – 11:00am

How to Improve Patient Experience in the Emergency Department

More than 50 percent of patients are admitted through the emergency department, which means hospitals that focus on fostering positive patient experiences in the ED can expect to see a positive ripple effect throughout the rest of the hospital. Creating a high-performing emergency department that prioritizes patient satisfaction can be a huge advantage to your hospital. This session will explore the benefits of high-performing emergency departments, what happens when emergency departments poorly perform, and ways you can provide an exceptional emergency department experience at your hospital.

11:00am – 11:45am

Engaging Physicians to Enhance the Patient Experience

It has become clear that patients care about both clinical quality and service satisfaction and don’t necessarily differentiate the two. With the advent of extensive publicly available information about both clinical quality and service satisfaction, providers must examine how well they are meeting patient expectations and work to identify tactics to improve patient service. As part of this effort, they must enlist physicians as partners in understanding and eliminating patient service dis-satisfiers. This session will explore strategies to engage physicians in enhancing the service satisfaction dimension of the patient experience with a focus on early lessons learned from the field.

11:45am – 12:30pm

The Relationship Between Patient Safety and Patient Experience

Safety is a key driver of patient experience. When patients feel secure and trust their caregivers, they feel protected. And their positive perspectives are reflected in data results. Hospitals commonly examine patient safety and other quality indicators to evaluate and improve performance in relation to quality and safety. A growing body of research has separately examined relationships between patient safety culture and patient experience on clinical outcomes and other quality indicators. However, there is a knowledge gap regarding the relationship between these two important domains. This session will explore the relationship between patient safety and patient experience in hospital settings.

12:30pm – 1:30pm

Luncheon

1:30pm – 2:15pm

Leveraging Technology to Improve Patient Experience

Patient engagement has been defined as a concept that combines a patient's knowledge, skills, ability and willingness to manage his/her own health and care with interventions designed to increase activation and promote positive patient behavior. Engagement with patients and their families has become a key strategy to improve care delivery and drive business in many healthcare providers. With today’s electronic environment, developing and leveraging appropriate tools, technologies and informatics methods can enhance patient communication and facilitate patient satisfaction. This session will explore ways to engage patients and families to provide for a more personal interaction and improve patient experience.

2:15pm – 3:15pm

Panel: Driving a Strong Patient Experience Culture

There’s so much more to improving patient experiences than good patient satisfaction survey results. Creating a culture that values the patient experience and uses data to drive decisions is critical. But to drive a strong patient experience culture, leaders must be willing to make bold moves. This session will feature leaders who are elevating the patient experience at their organizations and empowering care teams to deliver the best possible experience to patients every day. Topics to be discussed will include:

- Using patient experience data and storytelling to build an experience-centered culture

- Adjusting your metrics to drive change and action across your organization

- Making bold moves today to get you on the path to a modern patient experience program

3:15pm – 3:45pm

Networking & Refreshments Break

3:45pm – 4:30pm

The Relationship Between Patient Experience and Patient Satisfaction

Patient experience and patient satisfaction are healthcare terms that are too often used interchangeably. Although they appear to be synonymous – a patient’s hospital experience should be satisfactory, one might assume – they are in fact separate terms that have entirely different meanings to healthcare professionals.

The difference between patient experience and patient satisfaction has implications for quality improvement in healthcare. Thus, it is vital that healthcare professionals understand the distinction between the two concepts and apply them appropriately to their work. Doing so will drive patient-centered care and make those pursuits more precise. To what extent does patient experience account for variation in patient satisfaction with a healthcare system? Which aspects of patient experience relate most strongly to satisfaction with services? This session will explore the concept of patient experience and its relationship with patient satisfaction.

4:30pm – 5:15pm

The Impact of Digitization on Patient Experience

Technology is reshaping the relationship between patients, healthcare providers and the healthcare system. Mobile plays a crucial role, as it has become the patient’s constant companion. By connecting patients and healthcare providers, treatments can be improved due to non-stop real-time gathered data. By providing access to such accurate information, healthcare providers can take immediate action if necessary. This can prevent conditions from worsening and therefore improve quality of life. The transformational change in the healthcare industry is thus only taking place because patients are empowered by using digital tools on every step of their journey. This session will explore the impact of digitization on patient experience.

5:15pm

End of Day One

7:15am – 8:00am

Networking Breakfast

8:00am – 8:15am

Chairperson’s Remarks

8:15am – 9:00am

How to Use Team-Based Care to Improve the Patient Experience

As healthcare professionals are working to support a positive patient experience in an industry increasingly embracing value-based care, they are leaning on team-based care for support. Team-based care acknowledges that there are multiple key players treating a patient and that each of them must work with one another in order to drive optimal care outcomes. Members of a care team may include doctors, nurses, physician assistants, specialists, and other non-clinical professionals who are integral to caring for a patient. Team-based care can be successful when all members are on the same page. Topics to be discussed will include:

- A clear, common goal

- A culture shift that facilitates teamwork

- Supportive organizational frameworks

- Effective teamwork coaching

9:00am – 9:45am

Provider Communication Strategies for Creating Patient Trust

To develop patient-provider relationships characterized by patient trust, clinicians must lean into their strong interpersonal skills and deliver care with empathy. Evidence shows that patient trust is important for higher patient satisfaction scores. Patients who trust their doctors usually perceive their care as better, despite whether they see better clinical outcomes. These patients believe their providers are competent and have made clinical decisions that are best for a patient’s conditions, laying the groundwork for a trusting relationship. But generating a high level of patient trust is not always easy. Appointments are generally short, leaving only a small window of time during which providers can build rapport with patients and establish the groundwork for a meaningful patient-provider relationship. With most patients only visiting the doctor once or twice each year, these time constraints can pose a considerable challenge. And building out those relationships with vulnerable patient populations can be even more challenging. These patients have a baseline lower trust level with their providers, meaning more work must be done to overcome barriers.

Leaning on strong communication skills is essential for providers building patient trust. Delivering care in the language with which the patient feels most comfortable, creating a positive and non-judgmental environment, and being honest with patients will be key to creating trust. This session will explore provider communication strategies for creating patient trust.

9:45am – 10:15am

Networking & Refreshments Break

10:15am – 11:00am

How Patient Journey Mapping Can Improve Patient Experience

Healthcare organizations are working diligently to improve patient satisfaction and experience of care, asking, “How can we make the patient experience better?” However, it’s no secret that it’s difficult to capture the multitude of challenges patients face when navigating their healthcare journey. That makes improving it even more difficult. With such a vast landscape of potential interventions, a fundamental step to improving patient experience is understanding what that experience is today. This is where patient journey mapping comes into play. Using patient journey maps, providers can understand the highs, lows, and gaps to begin pinpointing what types of interventions will be most impactful, and of those interventions, which changes you have the power to make. As a result, you will be better positioned to manage your patient’s journey, improve care pathways, and meet—and exceed—patient expectations, needs, and wants. This session will explore how patient journey mapping can improve patient experience.

11:00am – 11:45am

How Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Initiatives Can Improve Patient Experience

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is a catchphrase that you may have heard within your organization. But for hospitals and health systems, it takes on a more complex meaning when it comes to meeting the needs of not only the patients, but also the healthcare workers who interact with the patients every day. This session will explore how can hospitals integrate DEI initiatives within the patient experience and how can that lead to better patient outcomes.

11:45am – 12:30pm

Marketing’s Important Role in Patient Experience

Designing and delivering a unique and authentic patient experience should not just develop by happenstance. Marketers have the important role of making sure patient experience aligns with the organization’s brand and value proposition. This session will explore essential elements for achieving exceptional patient experience, including:

- Elevating the patient’s online experience

- Focusing on content

- Reputation management

- Ongoing communication

- Anticipating patient needs

- Investing in technology

12:30pm

Conference Concludes

12:45pm – 2:45pm

Workshop

Using Patient Experience to Drive Improvement

This session will explore the proven data collection techniques of experience-based design to truly understand your patients’ needs, drive quality improvement efforts, and prompt staff innovation and engagement. There are many ways to embed the patient’s voice in re-designing processes. Often, old processes are designed more around the resources available and less around the patient experience. When patient focus groups are used, sometimes we don’t know what to do with all the results. We’ll discuss on how to use the data you collect to improve processes and measure results. Topics to be explored will include:

- How to add clarity and consistency to your quality improvement work

- How to identify emotional touchpoints that influence the patient experience

- Qualitative and quantitative experience-based design methods to guide process improvement

- Tools and techniques to apply to your next improvement project