Understanding Patient Experience: Best Practices and Lessons from HCAHPS Successes
Patient experience has become a major factor in health care — and for good reason. Not only is patient experience (aka patient satisfaction) now directly tied [...]

Patient experience has become a major factor in health care — and for good reason. Not only is patient experience (aka patient satisfaction) now directly tied to reimbursement, but as the health care marketplace becomes more competitive via partnerships, mergers and new entrants, patients — many of whom are paying higher deductibles —are increasingly noting the value and service they receive in their health care delivery. As a result, health care, like other industries, is becoming more consumer-centric. Providers must respond accordingly.
Some health care organizations are basing their patient experience efforts on staff communications training, ensuring that all clinical staff address and treat each patient warmly and professionally. Others believe patient experience must include an array of community-based outreach programs on subjects like heart health, dieting, and diabetes prevention. Indeed, all of these efforts fall under the “patient experience” category.
Wherever your organization stands on defining patient experience, it should not keep you from learning from and, if appropriate, adopting best practices in patient experience gleaned from other organizations, particularly those that can be implemented with a minimum of cost or change.
Defining Patient Experience
The term “patient experience” has now been used in health care for enough years to be a part of the everyday vocabulary of most organizations. Yet ask a group of disparate health care administrators for their individual definitions of “patient experience” and you might get a set of responses as varied as the answers supplied in the traditional Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant:
Depending on which part of the elephant they touched, the blind men described the elephant differently. For example, the elephant’s tail was thought to be a rope; the elephant’s trunk was like the thick branch of a tree. And so on.
In other words, despite the 2006 advent of the first national, standardized, publicly reported survey of patients’ perspectives of hospital care — Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) —there’s still not complete consensus on what patient experience is or could be.
For purposes of this article, we’ll use the definition of patient experience advanced by the patient experience consultancy The Beryl Institute: “The sum of all interactions, shaped by an organization’s culture, that influence patient perceptions across the continuum of care.” It’s a purposefully broad definition of patient experience intended to cover the gamut of efforts to create positive patient interactions.
As for best practices in patient experience, the Association for Patient Experience defines a “best practice” in patient experience as a technique or methodology that has reliably proven to lead to a desired result. At a minimum, according to the Association for Patient Experience, it should:
Lessons from HCAHPS Successes
Though initial HCAHPS results are based on inpatient experiences, we can already glean tremendous insights about patient experience from them. The Armstrong Institute analyzed the comparative database of HCAHPS, representing more than 3,000 hospitals and identified 176 facilities of various sizes that had achieved top ranking or made major improvements in their HCAHPS domains of communication, staff responsiveness, discharge planning, and pain management. In addition, leaders from 52 of these hospitals completed an anonymous survey about their organizations’ practices.
From this information, Armstrong identified the following most common best practices in patient experience:
Often, patient experience-related improvements provide long-term benefits to both patients and their health care providers. That’s what occurred with a Freed client, a major health care system, that implemented a “transitions of care” pilot program to provide post-discharge telephonic support for high-risk patients age 65 and older discharging home without any home care. The program’s goal, which was successfully met, was to reduce the risk of avoidable hospital readmissions. The program ultimately benefitted patients and their loved ones, as well as the health care system.
Additional Best Practices
In addition to the HCAHPS-defined best practices listed above, the following may also benefit your organization’s patient experience practices, which in turn may ultimately benefit your HCAHPS scores:
A Team Effort
Most of all, understand that “patient experience” improvements are not a top-directed, bottom-implemented effort, but rather a complete, enterprise-wide endeavor that must be led and reinforced regularly by your organization’s leaders, publicly rewarded as appropriate and quickly fixed if lacking. While no organization can achieve complete patient experience perfection, patients will notice (and mentally record) the efforts you make on their behalf. Don’t hesitate to communicate to patients the patient experience improvements you have made.