​Prioritising Patient Experience

A good clinical outcome will always be the key aim for patient and healthcare provider alike, but the patient’s healthcare experience is an area of growing focus for providers seeking to differentiate themselves from the competition.

Some hospitals are seeking to improve the inpatient experience by giving patients more control over their immediate surroundings – their room.  As the highest quality hospitals look to emulate the facilities of a good hotel, patients will kiss goodbye to the days where, for entertainment, they had only a call button in one hand and a dated TV remote in the other.

Giving the Patient Control

At the Stead Family Children's Hospital, University of Iowa, patients can now control not just the TV but the lighting, when and what they eat, and communication with nurses.  Rooms also feature video games and Skype systems.

​Largely as a result of these changes, and efforts to reduce the number of alarms heard by patients, the hospital's patient experience scores have increased from 40% to 89% in the last 12 months.

Increased staff efficiency

The new technology is not only being used for the entertainment of patients – it is also allowing staff to operate more efficiently.  In the days where patients only had a call button, a nursing assistant would have to visit a patient each time the button was pressed, find out what they needed, and then report back to the nurse.  The hospital now has a ‘pain’ button which instantly tells nurses what the problem is and allows them to respond more quickly.

Much of the new technology deployed at the Stead Family Children's Hospital is produced by healthcare technology company Oneview.  CEO James Fitter believes that “Technology should make care experiences more simple and less complex.  Rather than adding to the healthcare team's workload, technology should empower providers to focus on what they do best: Care for patients.”

MSB and Patient Experience

MSB has an enviable track record of providing patient experience research to the NHS and private healthcare providers in the UK and internationally.  Our ability to provide quantitative research as well as world class verbatim and sentiment analysis enables us to provide analysis and recommendations of unrivalled quality.

To learn more about MSB’s extensive experience in the healthcare sector, please visit the Patient Experience page on our website – www.msbconsultancy.com.