Health Care Providers Turn to Disney to Improve ‘Patient Experience’
October 18th, 2011
Patient satisfaction scores are poised to impact federal Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates beginning in 2013, and as new reporting requirements and a changing health care landscape loom, hospital administrators nationwide are struggling to identify cost-effective methods for increasing patient satisfaction scores.
This is easier said than done, due largely to the wide range of factors that may or may not impact an individual patient's perception of the quality of service they receive within a particular hospital. The intangible nature of patient satisfaction-often called the "patient satisfaction problem"-is prompting hospital administrators to explore new and unconventional approaches to service delivery. Increasingly, they are turning to Disney.
Media coverage of this emerging trend in health care services has been widespread, with outlets like USA Today, among others, exploring this new approach to improving the quality of the "patient experience" hospitals provide-the goal: to positively impact the way patients feel about the service they receive.
Despite the fact that Disney Institute only recently began formally offering its health care consulting services, Austin, Texas-based Hospital Housekeeping Systems (HHS) began working with Disney to address these issues within their organization in late 2008, a full two full years prior to the formal launch of Disney Institute's health care consulting services this summer.
"We turned to Disney because we could see that the 'patient experience' was becoming increasingly important in our industry;" explains Jeff Totten, HHS's President of Management Development and Resource Loss & Control, "that acute-care housekeeping would need to shift to a hospitality-focused approach in order to meet the emerging needs of a changing health care industry."
HHS employs more than 6,300 employees (now called "team members") in 20 states, and Totten says it has been "a significant challenge" to create a truly pervasive, positive culture across such a decentralized organization.
"Our goal is to ensure that each of our team members is recognized for his or her efforts, and feels empowered to consistently provide the exceptional level of service that HHS's reputation has been built on," Totten explains.
As HHS began to implement new employee engagement initiatives and put the lessons learned from Disney into action, executives quickly noted that as employee satisfaction rates began to climb, so too did patient satisfaction scores.
"We believe that happy employees equal happy customers," Totten explains, "and the results we've already begun to see from our work with Disney are supporting that belief."
HHS's work with Disney has thus far focused on Leadership Excellence and People Management (two of the five primary areas of Disney's program; the other three are Quality Service, Brand Loyalty, and Inspiring Creativity), as well as a custom seminar commissioned for the executive group in May of this year, which involved several Disney "secret shoppers" visiting HHS partner facilities to assess, first-hand, the corporate culture and employee environment.
Asked if HHS plans to continue to work with Disney in the future, Totten says, "absolutely-we've seen extremely positive results from our relationship with Disney."
HHS's CEO, Ryan Williams, agrees.
"Our work with Disney has had a much larger impact on our business operations than we had originally anticipated," Williams says. "We believe that working closely with Disney will ensure our continued ability to provide our partner hospitals the best service in the industry."
