UPMC’s multiyear quest to improve patient satisfaction is beginning to pay off through higher survey results. The effort involves technology developed by a UPMC Enterprises project that helps hospitals engage patients and their frontline caregivers.
Patient satisfaction is trending higher at UPMC, which attained an HCAHPS score of 41 in the first six months of 2018, up from 28 in a baseline period in 2016-2017. HCAHPS, the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, is a patient satisfaction survey required by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for all hospitals.
To boost patient satisfaction, hospital leaders, nurses and managers are rounding with patients and employees and interviewing them about care and services provided. UPMC is using ParlaiQ, a responsive, web-based application developed at UPMC Enterprises, to guide rounding interviews and collect data from those conversations.
“UPMC believes happier employees equals happier patients. It’s our mission at UPMC to make patient and employee satisfaction a top priority,” said Tami Minnier, UPMC Chief Quality Officer.
ParlaiQ for Patient Interviews is in use at 23 UPMC hospitals and has been used to conduct nearly 48,000 interviews since November 2017. ParlaiQ for Employee Interviews is in a pilot phase at UPMC.
The survey tools, which are for tablets, smartphones, and other mobile devices, capture guided, real-time conversations between patients, caregivers and leaders, and provide actionable insights for service recovery, hospital operations, and opportunities to reward and recognize excellent care.
Patient rounding allows hospitals to manage patient experience on the front-end and ensure patient expectations are met. Rounding empowers patients through consistent interaction with hospital team members. It also results in informed caregivers who have access to real-time census and patient satisfaction data so they can monitor and prioritize patient needs, and invested hospital leaders who can use data to build proactive and accountable patient care environments.
“We are doing more than having patients and employees fill out surveys. ParlaiQ enables UPMC to have meaningful conversations while still capturing essential data that we can use to improve,” Minnier said.
The ParlaiQ team is working on further enhancements to the tools, including updated analytics, customizable reports and data visualization, as well as a version of ParlaiQ for Patient-Reported Outcomes (PROs).
Minnier and Jody Madala, Senior Product Manager on the ParlaiQ team, will give a presentation on UPMC’s patient satisfaction work at Healthcare Analytics Summit 2018 (HAS18) in September in Salt Lake City. The three-day summit is expected to draw about 1,400 attendees representing 300 health care organizations.
The ParlaiQ team also will discuss how the application connects to the Health Catalyst platform as a featured partner in HAS18’s Digital Innovations showcase. HAS18 is Health Catalyst’s invitation-only user conference. ParlaiQ is one of the first companies to participate in Health Catalyst’s Independent Software Vendor (ISV) program, a co-selling agreement between the two organizations in which survey data generated by ParlaiQ will be incorporated into Health Catalyst’s analytics offerings.
