Improving the Patient Experience Means Remembering Our Healthcare Employees
In 1972, a brand new Lockheed Tristar jet was being piloted by an Eastern Airlines crew that was arriving at Miami International Airport. As preparations were made to land, the captain and his officers noticed a gear indicator on the control panel was malfunctioning. As the ultimately tragic story concludes, the pilots became so beguiled by this defective signal, that they forgot to pay attention to their altitude, and eventually crashed into the Florida everglades.
The frightening tale of Flight 401 is a perfect example of inattention blindness – being so focused on a singular element, we miss the obvious and important sights right before our eyes.
In healthcare, we've seen a massive push towards improving the patient experience, which is unequivocally the right focus. However, equally critical to transformational change are our clinical team members, and there are distressing signals they are often forgotten from these efforts.
This disconnect – being so myopically focused on the consumer that we forget about the employee – has recently been highlighted in various forms. In a fabulous article for Forbes, Blake Morgan dedicates an entire section to emphasizing how the employee experience is inextricably linked to creating great customer experiences. She doubles-down on this in her book, More is More, where she makes this simple but powerful observation:
“Often, the customer experience will tell us everything we need to know about what it’s like to work at the company. Frustrating or amazing, the customer experience is a reflection of the employee experience.” Pg. 73, Chap. ‘Offer a Strong Employee Experience’
Beacons of employee engagement like the Ritz-Carlton and Google get called out in her writings, but it’s their simplest initiatives that draw the most attention. Morgan highlights employers that charge their teams to find and use the right tools, actively participate in change management, and those that give employees a megaphone for opinions and insights on key initiatives. Ultimately, as both her article and book suggest, to truly change experiences, we must reinforce that our customers and employees are in the same boat, and we can't take care of one without the other.
As we look at the state of healthcare today, we unfortunately seem to be exacerbating the issues of the employees that are fundamental for the patient experience. The bandwidth and burnout dilemmas we’re currently facing are compounded by change initiatives that remove key employees from the co-design process. Missing this particular balance leads to efforts that often magnify pain-points from both the patient and employee perspective.
This dilemma was amplified in another recent piece; “Death By A Thousand Clicks: Leading Boston Doctors Decry Electronic Medical Records”. The article illustrates how the very people taxed by the burdensome electronic medical records laws and systems, were the very ones missing during their design or selection. The result? Doctors overburdened by software they don’t like, with patients who feel their physician has been obstructed – not empowered – to support them in a meaningful, individualized way.
Our healthcare teams are comprised of some of the most dedicated, well-trained, and caring nurses, doctors, and support staffers. And yet, we’ve often created discouraging employee experiences – inundating clinicians with onerous tools and processes, and pulling them away from serving their patients.
Much like we’ve seen in retail, banking, and hospitality over the last three decades, it’s incredibly encouraging that modern healthcare is focusing so much on improving the patient experience, and you won't find a more energetic advocate for the patient than me.
But, as Morgan points out, the employee experience is pivotal to the ultimate success (or failure) of patient experience improvement efforts. Whether through co-design initiatives, collaborative workshops, or inclusion in early-stage project management work, keeping our clinical teams embedded and empowered is a key part of the journey towards ensuring success for both our patients, and those who serve them.