Journal of Healthcare Management - January/February 2014 - (Page 44)

Journal of H ealt H care M anage Ment 59:1 J anuary /f ebruary 2014 suboptimal. The ability to collect and respond to negative patient comments in a timely way is critical to improving the patient experience, but such actions usually occur outside the written HCAHPS survey of discharged patients. Ideally, hospitals should receive feedback soon after the incident that prompted a negative comment to allow staff to accurately recall the problem experienced by the patient (Luxford, Safran, & Delbanco, 2011). HCAHPS surveys conducted by telephone allow organizations to capture anecdotal comments, and recorded patient comments collected during a telephone survey can be made available to the hospital soon after the interview and then forwarded to the patient representative or advocate. Patient representatives serve on grievance committees, which play a significant role in providing meaningful follow-up to patients' comments from satisfaction surveys (Charters, 1993). In the two hospitals where this study was conducted, comments that meet predefined criteria (i.e., involve multiple departments, complex problems, or frequent themes) are forwarded to the appropriate managers. Furthermore, these comments are added to the next grievance committee agenda. This practice is important for two reasons: It provides the organizational infrastructure for reviewing anecdotal comments, and it confirms the value of negative anecdotal comments, given that they trigger the committee's attention, further extending implications of the present study's results. Many tools used by the hospital quality review committee are also used by the hospital grievance committee, promoting synergy between the efforts to improve both the patient experience and patient quality outcomes. Quality and patient experience no longer are treated as separate aspects of patient care and have become integrated under the overall umbrella of optimal patient outcomes. The best results occur in hospitals that create environments where responsibility for patient experience is owned by all, not just the patient representative (Matthews & Poole, 2012). l i M i tat i o N S This study involved only two community hospitals and used HCAHPS data collected over a short duration. A larger sample of hospitals that includes academic, tertiary care, and specialty institutions would make the findings more generalizable. Furthermore, because patients undergo more highly involved procedures at academic medical centers and tertiary care facilities than at the community hospitals used in this study, the former set of patients may volunteer more written comments and thus provide a more complete picture of patients' experience. In addition, our outcome measures consisted of only the global hospital rating and intention measures contained in the HCAHPS survey. While these are commonly used metrics in studies of this kind, future research should expand the range of outcomes investigated to include measures of patient compliance, changes in health status, readmission, and other indicators of care quality. Finally, this study relied on HCAHPS surveys administered by mail, which contain no space for patients to handwrite comments, depressing 44

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Journal of Healthcare Management - January/February 2014

Journal of Healthcare Management - January/February 2014
Contents
Interview With Kenneth R. White, PhD, FACHE, Associate Dean for Strategic Partnerships and Innovation and the University of Virginia Medical Center Professor of Nursing, University of Virginia School of Nursing
Team-Based Care at Mayo Clinic: A Model for ACOs
The Management Springboard: Eight Ways to Launch Your Career as a Healthcare Leader
The Role of a Public–Private Partnership: Translating Science to Improve Cancer Care in the Community Donna M. O’Brien and Arnold D. Kaluzny
The Value of Patients’ Handwritten Comments on HCAHPS Surveys John W. Huppertz and Robert Smith
Can Inbound and Domestic Medical Tourism Improve Your Bottom Line? Identifying the Potential of a U.S. Tourism Market
Success Factors for Strategic Change Initiatives: A Qualitative Study of Healthcare Administrators’ Perspectives

Journal of Healthcare Management - January/February 2014