Patient Engagement

Patient experience matters because patients matter

"All voices matter. Every interaction matters. Every patient matters. Patient experience matters."

Les Starck

Les Starck

Remember the absurd statement that Ascension Health CIO Mark Barner made at HIMSS16, about not paying attention to complaints on social media about some of the more mundane aspects of the patient experience?

Well, it turns out, little things like food and parking do matter. So do bigger elements such as compassion, comfort and empathy.

That was the message Jason Wolf, president of the Beryl Institute, delivered during the opening session of his organization’s 2016 Patient Experience Conference in Dallas.

“All voices matter. Every interaction matters. Every patient matters. Patient experience matters,” Wolf said.

As if to drive home the point, Wolf later ceded the stage to Irish tenor Dr. Ronan Tynan, who talked about his own experience as a champion disabled athlete, as a physician and, ultimately, a world-renowned singer. An otherwise nondescript hotel ballroom got transformed into a concert hall, as Tynan ended his presentation by belting out a stirring rendition of Leonard Cohen’s classic, “Hallelujah.”

This greatly enhanced the conference experience for the nearly 1,000 people in the room.

Tynan closed a rousing session that also was bookended at the start by a video of a man who survived a heart attack while rowing in Southern California. The man, Les Starck, who appeared on stage to introduce Wolf, attributed his survival and recovery to the care and compassion he experienced at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, in addition to his own family and faith. “The nurses, they treated us like family,” Starck said. “I’m a miracle.”

“It’s time for this conversation to shift,” Wolf said. “This is our opportunity to choose to go to the moon.”

Wolf noted that Health Affairs editor Alan Weil wrote about the patient experience in that journal’s April issue. Last week, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, patient-safety expert Dr. Donald M. Berwick said it was time for healthcare to move into “era 3,” a “moral era … guided by updated beliefs” that include compassion and patient-centeredness.

“Every patient has a story,” Wolf repeated throughout his presentation. “Every story touches countless lives as well,” he added at one point.

“People are looking for the care that they believe they deserve.”

Here’s the video of Starck’s story:

Photo: Twitter user Beryl Institute

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