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 Today in Health IT, we're discussing Health Systems Embrace Hospitality to Transform Patient Experience. My name is Kate Gamble.

I'm Managing Editor at This Week Health, where we host a set of channels and events dedicated to transforming healthcare for our patients. One connection at a time. I've been interviewing CXOs for more than a decade, and I'm thrilled to bring that experience into this community. Today, we're talking about health systems embracing hospitality to transform patient experience.

And I'm joined by Sarah Richardson, president of This Week Health 229 Executive Development Community. Sarah, thank you for being here. Yeah. And happy Friday the 13th, Kate. Thank you too. Yeah, before we get into the article, I think we have to talk about Friday the 13th, and I wish I had some spooky music queued up right now.

But let's talk a little bit about the significance of 13 and how it became this, dreaded day. Yes we, you and I did some research. It's always fun when we have a sidebar on these things. The the historical and religious origins. Number 13 has been considered unlucky in many cultures.

In numerology, 12 is seen as a complete number. 12 months, 12 zodiac signs, 12 apostles, etc. making 13 irregular or unsettling. And then again, I think it was Fridays in Christianity. Friday was traditionally considered unlucky because it was believed to be the day that Jesus was crucified. And There is Christian lore associates Friday with significant biblical events, such as Eve offering the forbidden fruit to Adam, contributing to the day's bad luck reputation.

You and I grew up in exactly in this era, and there is not a moment when you don't associate Friday the 13th with Jason and a hockey mask. It just comes to mind and the origins of it, which is always curious. I love the fact that anyone listening to this podcast today, I hope you go to trivia night.

And that's one of the questions because we just prepared you to probably get some free beer and wings from our podcast today. It's the least we can do. And yeah, like you said, this is probably knowledge that you didn't have before. So you're welcome. But now I suppose we should get to the topic at hand, which is that health systems are looking to enhance quality outcomes and cultivate exceptional patient experiences by emphasizing a culture of service and hospitality training.

There were a few examples cited in the article. University Hospitals in Cleveland is working to reduce care variability and optimize clinical services for quality, safety, and efficiency while reinforcing compassionate care. They're also expanding research capabilities with plans to grow its 3, 400 studies and clinical trials.

And then you have Chapters Health System in Temple Terrance, Florida, which is focusing on employee engagement to boost satisfaction, investing in staff being and professional development. Two more examples. One, Brooklyn Health in New York City is aligning services with community needs and providing staff training for superior patient care.

And Advent Health in Florida is adopting a hospitality centered approach, investing in staff training centered on empathy and communication and developing personalized preventative care programs. So this concept of hospitality energy, which I love that is really gaining steam and This is right up your alley as someone who's been a CIO and worked in hospitality.

So I would think that this really strikes a chord for you. It struck a huge chord for me because I've been talking about this, these parallels for 20 plus years. And sometimes people take umbrage to the fact that I'm like, if you can run a hotel, you can run a hospital. And they're like, but there's patient care involved.

And I said, yeah that's a differentiator because studies have shown that there's considerable overlap in operational areas. Up to 70% Similarity and management functions between hospitals and hotels. My first degree is a bachelor of science in hospital administration from UNLV. And I learned about housekeeping and maintaining clean, comfortable environments.

I learned about registration and efficient check in processes. I learned about purchasing, effective supply chain management, assuring the availability of necessary resources. Even going back to my first internship while I was in college was in food purchasing or in the purchasing department. And I had to unload lobsters off the dock at six o'clock in the morning in the middle of the summer.

And I'm telling you, that wasn't like the most fun experience, which made me realize that maybe food purchasing wasn't going to be my career in the hospitality industry. But then the food services, providing quality nutrition services, contributing to overall satisfaction, being, engineering, facility maintenance, and safety are critical to operations.

Those are just five areas. There's a direct overlap between running a hospital and running a hotel. When you take it into the relevance of where a CIO is seeing it today. Integrating hospitality principles and necessities about robust IT support is paramount. You've got implementing systems that facilitate personalized patient interaction, efficient service delivery, and seamless communications across the departments.

That role of the CIO is crucial in deploying technologies that support the initiatives, such as your CRM systems and the patient portals. So Kate, when you look into this and consider, wow. You know what? We need to have data integration for personalized care. What are some of the things that you think about?

Yeah, so you have to be, you have to look at leveraging EHRs and data analytics to provide insights into patient preferences and enable tailored care plans. And when you look at, enhancing patient engagement through technology, By implement by implementing user friendly patient portals and mobile apps, you can facilitate appointment scheduling, access to medical records, and direct communication with providers.

And this patient engagement piece, or the engagement piece, I should say, is something that the hospitality industry has always prioritized. And to see that happening more in healthcare, I think, is absolutely vital. And even training the staff on all the digital tools that are available.

Comprehensive training programs ensure staff are proficient in using the tools, which leads to improved patient interactions and operational efficiency. If you're going to have the person walking through the patient portal with the patient, how to pay a bill, how to make an appointment, how to check on your labs, as an example, they have to be very comfortable using it as well.

The same methodology, the same perspective of Are you a patient of your own health care system? And if not, how are you finding ways to be that patient or have that patient experience? Same parallels we learned in college about if you're going to work in a health care system or work, start over in college, where if you're going to work in a hotel, you get to be a guest.

I used to think that was the most exciting part.

of being a

hotel student was you get to stay in a hotel until you got the checklist of the things that you had to go research. But Conrad Hilton had a book called Be My Guest. And one of the first things that he would do when he checked into one of his own hotel rooms was go lay in the bathtub and look up at the ceiling and look around and What was the experience of that guest?

Because when you're sitting, I guess in the bathtub, especially, you're more inclined to be looking for the different aspects of what's happening in a room, for example. And I'm really picky about hotel rooms just because of that background and training. But those checklists really encourage you to understand what that experience is and what the metrics we need to be using to measure the success of our programs, whether it's cleanliness back to housekeeping, or how efficient was the registration and check in process.

Those things will never change from the experience. Experience of the person consuming the service. Yeah. And of course there's gonna be different metrics in healthcare, but it is a little bit more it is a little bit more dynamic than it used to be as far as, it's not just about whether a patient was healed or not.

There's so many different components and some of the ways they can measure that experience is. Looking at patient portal usage, what percentage registered for the portal, frequency of logins, actions performed on the portal, but then also looking at appointment adherence, no show rates, rescheduled, canceled appointments, percentage of follow up appointments kept, and of course patient satisfaction scores.

You have surveys like HCAHPS and then net promoter scores that gauge the likelihood of patients recommending the service. So this is qualitative feedback from patients about their experiences. An NPS was something that has come into healthcare more recently. NPS used to be more of a retail or more of a consumer based perspective.

Now we have the consumerism of healthcare. An NPS is a measurement I've been using in healthcare organizations for quite a few years. I actually created an NPS score for the IT satisfaction rating within my last organization. It's how well is IT being received by the organization and would they be likely to recommend our services.

In the first year, we were not great. And by the end of the third year of measuring, excuse me, we were doing great. We literally had raised ourselves into the percentile that we would want to be in. Cause it goes back to that reputational perspective, whether you're an internal customer or external customer in any setting is.

What do you want to be known for? And if it's quality and outcomes, the ability to get an appointment, the ability to pay your bill, the ability to understand what your labs are telling you, those are huge implications and why that hospitality aspect is going to be such an important factor going forward.

Yeah, and I like that you did that in IT. That's really interesting. And with any type of with any technology, especially digital tools, we also have to look at health literacy and patient comprehension of discharge instructions and using tools like the teach back method to ensure patients understand their care plans and engagement in educational contact and making sure that these, the videos and the reading materials are accessible.

are understandable to different patient populations. And if you look at digital health metrics, it's also about the number of patients who engage with health related mobile apps and click through rates, but also participation in virtual health coaching or telehealth services. And consider how far behind we are as a country and as a health system provider overall in what we're going to see as the boomer generation aging into Medicare.

And if you can get in front of that now, these digital engagement metrics, the preventative care, the shared decision making, treatment adherence, readmission, and outcome data, and that feedback and community involvement, All those types of measurements are going to be tremendous because you're going to have a shortage of care providers.

And so if you have to have virtual health coaching or telehealth services, the ease of participation, just as one example, is going to have significant positive impact on all the different metrics and ideas that we have shared. And let's be honest, As people age into certain populations, that need for the human approach, the human centric approach, the human in the loop is more important than ever.

So you need to know exactly where to have the human be in touch with that patient and where the digital technology becomes supportive in your strategy. So perfect time to be talking about this. Yeah. And The idea of healthcare taking a page from hotels and other hospitality industries in terms of understanding how well people are interacting with, in this case, providers, but, and how they're taking an active role in their health is so important.

Higher levels of engagement, are often associated with better outcomes, improves patient satisfaction, and lower healthcare costs. There's, there really are a lot of parallels between the two, and I'm glad that you could bring some of your perspective on that. And I have a feeling this is going to lead us into more of the wearable technologies that we always talk about.

If you and I had a wearable, into the mix of access and equity and engagement, then I think we're on the right track. We just have to do all of it with a hospitality lens as we're making decisions and bringing technology into healthcare systems. Exactly. That hospitality energy. We're going to bring it.

We're going to bring it. Don't forget to share this podcast with a friend or colleague. Use it as a foundation for daily or weekly discussions on the topics that are relevant to you and the industry. They can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Sarah, thank you so much for joining. Happy Friday the 13th.

You too. Thank you for listening.