The Patient Experience Is Evolving and Improving

To be a patient is to be vulnerable. At no time was this more apparent than during the COVID-19 pandemic. Post-pandemic, the patient experience in health care has become increasingly important. The third episode of the Sodexo Healthcare podcast, Powering Human Care, explores how the patient experience is evolving and how healthcare providers are reimagining the patient experience.

This episode’s guests, Jennifer Lorenz, chief patient experience officer at University Hospitals of Cleveland, and Mary Rohde, operations vice president at Sodexo Healthcare, begin by acknowledging that COVID-19 drastically changed many patients’ healthcare experiences and their outcomes. It was a period of adversity, fear, and disappointment. But healthcare staff found ways to connect with patients whose families and friends were banned from visiting them — despite staff being covered completely in PPE, social distancing and great uncertainty.

That experience led healthcare providers to find ways to meet patients where they are and to provide better human interaction. What emerged is the philosophy that a positive patient experience begins as soon as a person comes through the doors of a healthcare organization and is founded on the following:

• Personalized attention
• Good communication
• Interactive and informative connections
• Relationship building

Moreover, healthcare providers now recognize that patient experiences, patient outcomes and staff experiences are all interdependent. Moving forward, healthcare providers are finetuning how they ensure that patients are engaged, they are figuring out how they can best educate patients and their families, and they are increasing transparency. But there are challenges to this work, according to Lorenz and Rohde. Those challenges include:

• Finding ways to improve the patient experience while adhering to bottom lines
• Resolving labor shortages caused by staff burnout and worker resignations
• Uncovering ways for traveling healthcare staff to connect with patients on a personal level
• Maintaining good patient experiences with fewer healthcare personnel

Listen to episode 3 of the Powering Human Care podcast to learn more about this important issue and find out what Rohde and Lorenz see happening in the near future to overcome these challenges as we practice a more proactive approach to positive patient experiences.

Listen to the podcast