Consumers’ heightened expectations are requiring providers to be more customer centric, desiring greater convenience, better access to care, and more seamless experiences. However, healthcare organizations face a lengthy list of challenges including labor shortages and employee burnout.
Dash Research recently spoke with Dr. Jason Guardino, chief experience officer (CXO) of the Permanente Medical Group and a board-certified practicing Gastroenterologist at the Kaiser Permanente South Sacramento Medical Center. During our conversation at the Qualtrics X4 event, Dr. Guardino talked about building a foundation to provide remarkable patient experiences, implementing a new experience feedback and management system, and what is in store for 2023.
Building a Foundation for Great CX
“The pandemic has taught us a lot of lessons, some difficult,” says Guardino. “Prior to the pandemic, often healthcare was very transactional. However, Covid-19 really helped to bring that feeling of love for patients forward, offering comfort and support to so many, some of them in their last moments. It became very, very human. However, as the pandemic raged on, the migration moved from transactional to love to burnout. This makes for challenging circumstances for patient experience,” says Guardino.
According to Guardino, experience should be given the same amount of time and effort that quality of care outcomes, finances, or human resources receive. But with caregivers, you have to work to really tie it into patient care, not business outcomes. “Often when you create a culture of focusing on the experience, the other business aspects will align and improve. As a clinician, you become more meticulous, follow higher quality standards, and are less likely to make a major medical error when you are actively trying to create a better patient experience,” says Guardino.
More specific to The Permanente Group, Guardino is collaborating with Kaiser Foundation Health plan and Hospitals and co-leading a transformational effort that is guiding 21 medical centers and 80,000 physicians and staff to provide excellent patient and member experiences.
“We have been working to re-inspire our people with purpose and speak a common language. At the same time, we are instituting robust technology,” Guardino shares.
The needed digital transformation which occurred during the pandemic has providers leaning heavily on digital tools and platform. These technologies may help not only scale service capacity, but also use human resources more efficiently, such as allowing staff to manage a larger number of patients. The ability of providers to effectively integrate virtual care services into workflows helps to facilitate patient access to specialty care services that are not readily accessible for populations in underserved and remote communities, can support patients in communicating with care teams, ensure continuity in care, and engage and activate patients in managing their own care remotely.
From a customer technology perspective, The Permanente Group has been digging into convenience in a big way, striving to give people access to the care they want on their own terms and provide more options. “It’s about meeting people where they are at and providing options such as office visit and phone interactions. However, this convenience has to be met with quality and with the knowledge that there are humans and empathy in whatever option is chosen,” says Guardino.
Technologies that were pivoted to during the pandemic and are remaining firmly in place and being enhanced. “The digital front door has stuck after Covid and we feel the need will only heighten. We are giving our patients the ability to “Get Care Now”, where patients can be self-guided to timely, convenient care options that work best for them – including 24/7 advice and various appointments,” says Guardino.
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Closely tied to patient experience is the experience that clinicians and practitioners are having. The Permanente Group has been focusing on consistency and common language amongst its 21 medical centers as well as creating a shared purpose. “One of our shared purposes is about creating caring moments for patients, families and each other,” says Guardino
The Permanente Medical Group has constructed five service values to rally around – Safety, Compassion, Integrity, Excellence, and Efficiency. “Learning modules have been created to help people come together and learn our purpose and service values,” Guardino says, “We focus on discovery-based learning that emphasizes meaningful participant-guided conversations rather than someone lecturing to them. Activities bring small groups together of 4 or 5 people from all different parts of the organization. For example, this could be a surgeon with a security guard, a finance manager, and a medical assistant or nurse. Care givers as well as leaders are involved.”
Managing Feedback for Better Insights
“A lot of organizations become great at managing quality of care, finance. or human resources but getting to the point where experiences are actively managed the exact same way; that’s the next frontier,” says Guardino.
This is going to be a year for modernization with a focus on experience management. The Permanente Group entered into a contract with Qualtrics about 3 months ago, which supplanted a measurement-only system they had in place for 30 years. That system was not really delivering the insights that were needed. Many vendors were evaluated, but the group chose Qualtrics because they knew the company would be a really strong partner. Qualtrics will also bring in the ability to have qualitative feedback gathered and analyzed so that it can be fed back to the people creating the experiences.
“We are still in the design phase, but I am really excited about getting this solution in place and being able to better identify areas of opportunity. Another aspect we are focused on is bringing the positive comments from patients to our people so they can feel the love of gratitude and appreciation – at a time when they need their souls filled from the last many years of burnout due to the pandemic,” says Guardino.
Looking ahead for this year, priorities for the experience initiative include the following:
- Building a robust service recovery program. Also, being able to close the loop and feed our people with the positive feedback that is often hard to deliver
- Look for ways to make things easier for patients
- Help leaders lead differently and improve mechanisms to express gratitude
- And probably most important – making meaningful human emotional connections
“Experience is really the driver that helps to bring quality of care and other aspects such as finances to the next level. Experiences shouldn’t be looked at as an add-on, or a nice-to-have. Many leaders look at the experience as icing on the cake, but what I believe, is that the experience is the cake,” says Guardino.
Author Information
As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.
Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.
