Every Moment Matters: Building a Better Experience
Sometimes even the best medicine cannot compete with a favorite meal and a visit with family to make a patient feel better.
That’s what a care team at Backus Hospital discovered recently while caring for a patient who was in isolation for a month recovering from an infectious disease.
Because of strict contact restrictions, the young mother’s three small children could not come to the hospital. They missed each other terribly.
To help them stay in touch, Backus staff members loaned the patient an iPad, allowing her to communicate with her family via FaceTime. They also brought her a care package from her favorite fast-food restaurant.
While the patient was healing physically because she received outstanding medical treatment, she was also feeling better emotionally because she was receiving compassionate care.
It is this type of small, seemingly insignificant gesture, said East Region President Bimal Patel, that will define Hartford HealthCare over the next three to five years, making it the regional healthcare system where people know they will not only get excellent care, but also that they will truly be well cared for.
In 2016, Hartford HealthCare launched a major, multi-year campaign to transform itself into an organization focused on customer experience. President and COO Jeffrey A. Flaks likened it to a “moon shot.”
“We are talking about creating an organization where empathy is at its very heart,’’ Flaks told system executives gathered at regional quarterly Leadership Forums in October. “Every leader will have personal goals relative to how we improve the employee and customer experience.’’
To help the organization focus on experience, Flaks and system CEO Elliot Joseph introduced our new rally cry — Every Moment Matters. More than a slogan, Flaks said, it’s a reminder that every experience, every interaction, every decision point, every single moment, is an opportunity to display discretionary effort, to be more in the moment, to listen and to demonstrate how much we really care.
Joseph said focusing on the patient/customer experience is the next step in Hartford HealthCare’s journey to become the region’s most trusted health system for personalized, coordinated care. He said the steps the organization has taken over the past eight years – creating our H3W culture of continuous improvement; building a network that provides more outpatient and community care, with less emphasis on inpatient care; and improving quality with initiatives such as hand hygiene — has gotten us ready.
“We touch people hundreds of thousands of times in so many settings,’’ Joseph said. “When people see our logo, it has a meaning about what touches their heart.’’