Successful Patient Engagement at Poudre Valley Health System
Increasingly, hospitals are recognizing that patient centered care is not only the right thing to do, but that it can lead to increased patient satisfaction, better care, and decreased costs. The Poudre Valley Health System in Colorado uses a number of different strategies that allow them to effectively engage their patients.
Poudre Valley Health System’s strategies are centered on developing specific organizational structures for responding to feedback, engaging staff in the initiatives, and several different formal feedback methods. All feedback is aggregated, analyzed, and then used to provide the basis for the development of initiatives.
The organizational structures to facilitate receiving and responding to patient feedback include a Customer Service Steering Committee, a Patient and Family Advisory Council, and Patient/Family Focus Groups. The Customer Service Steering Committee meets monthly to review feedback and design new initiatives, and has budgetary authority for major expenditures. The Patient and Family Advisory Council is composed of community members that meet monthly to manage different initiatives to enhance patient-centered care. The Patient/Family Focus Groups are ad hoc groups convened to provide feedback on specific initiatives or issues.
In addition to formal structures, the health system employs several means for receiving feedback including patient satisfaction surveys, volunteer liaisons who round daily to ask patients for feedback, and the GetWellNetwork, an individualized, interactive program that patients can use to receive information and make requests.
The Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality Innovations Exchange provides a complete description of the Poudre Valley Health System’s patient engagement strategies and the results they achieved, along with contact information. In addition, an excellent resource for tools to enhance patient- and family-centered approaches in healthcare is the Institute for Patient- and Family-Centered Care.
