Celebrating innovators in patient experience: PX Week 2023

Patient Experience Week is all about recognizing and celebrating the incredible healthcare staff who’ve dedicated their careers to helping others. At Press Ganey, we have a front-row seat to much of this work. And as our clients continually raise the bar on the patient—and human—experience, they also push the envelope on technological innovations in delivering Compassionate Connected Care.

This Patient Experience (PX) Week, we want to highlight the inspiring work we’ve had the privilege of being a part of. My colleague, and Press Ganey CXO, Chrissy Daniels already shared how Bronson Healthcare is bringing an equity lens to the care experience. But we work with so many other healthcare organizations who are truly elevating the patient voice and transforming the Human Experience, for every person in need of care. We are so proud of that work, and I’m honored to share some of their stories today.  

1. Northwell Health tunes in to community feedback with next-generation listening tools  

Northwell Health is New York’s largest healthcare provider. They’re also consistently at the forefront in their approach to patient experience, employing cutting-edge technology to solve complex problems across their 900+ hospitals and care centers.  

The need to be agile was particularly apparent during COVID-19, as the virus swept New York. But even more recently, when New York’s mask mandates were set to expire in February 2023, Northwell needed a quick, yet cohesive, strategy for gauging community sentiment around the policy change. While Northwell’s clinical team was already hard at work crafting a plan for evolving masking practices, they needed to know: How would patients feel about it? And what would make patients feel heard and safe during this period of change and uncertainty?  

Northwell and Press Ganey dove in, rapidly deploying digital, next-generation listening technologies to understand their community’s preferences—and validate their approach to masking. In record time, they collected feedback from 10,000+ recent patients.  

What they learned helped Northwell make decisions about masking guidance as well as their accompanying communication strategy. Read Northwell’s full story.

“The Press Ganey HX platform enabled us to rapidly engage our communities at scale. Within three weeks of making the decision to engage, we had robust quantitative and qualitative insights from a diverse demographic array of nearly 11,000 community members.”

Sven Gierlinger
SVP and Chief Experience Officer, Northwell Health

2. Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital improves care by elevating patient and family voices 

Joe DiMaggio is not only a leader in quality and safety, but they have firmly established a reputation for excellent patient- and family-centered care throughout the region—and beyond. So, what’s their secret? On their mission to “lead with love,” they make sure to bring in patients’ and families’ voices to continually elevate the experience of care. “Sharing the voice of the patient through our patient surveys and our digital rounding platform—and bringing that back to the stakeholders at the bedside—can help us understand that experience and how our families are perceiving care,” says Jineal Shinn, CNO at Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital.  

Using digital technologies, like digital rounding, helps the Joe DiMaggio team listen deeply to those in their charge, then act nimbly in how they respond to feedback—while keeping children and their families at the heart of all they do. And in the process, they help patients feel heard, valued, and loved. 

Watch their stories to see their patient experience strategies in action.  

“With Press Ganey as a partner, we share that same core: that we do it for the love of patients, we do it for the love of service to patients—and being able to listen to them.”

Caitlin Stella
Chief Executive Officer, Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital

3. Vanderbilt Health leverages real-time data to personalize care, for all 

With the tagline “Making Healthcare Personal,” Vanderbilt Health's mission and vision revolve around improving health through tailoring care. To do this, they rely on using patient feedback to monitor behaviors and improve processes. 

So, when their urgent care and anesthesia teams were looking to positively transform the patient experience, they knew they needed to get to the root of patients’ wants and needs. They turned to Press Ganey’s Human Experience platform to help them gather and analyze data, then act quickly on feedback. Using flexible, dynamic surveys, Vanderbilt gleaned real-time insights leading to improved daily operations and, ultimately, a more personalized patient experience.

See how Vanderbilt improves the patient experience.

“We can learn when patients need help, and that’s our job. Now we can keep up with every single patient, every single day.”

Brian Carlson
Vice President of Patient Experience, Vanderbilt Health

4. Health First’s comprehensive survey strategy that advances the patient experience  

Health First, Central Florida’s only fully integrated health system, is making strides to become more consumer-centric and focused on the holistic patient experience. To this end, they transformed their overarching patient listening philosophy, doubling down on collecting patient feedback through PX surveys. Health First then uses that data to understand each patient more deeply, and improve the experience of care.  

These efforts have not only delivered valuable insights about patients and the overall patient experience, but they’ve also led to improved survey ratings across Health First’s four hospitals.

Get Health First’s strategy, including lessons learned along their journey.  

“You can’t make a difference unless you know what’s important to the patient. By working with Press Ganey, we’re able to learn best practices and also hear what other organizations have achieved so that we can implement positive changes at Health First.”

Cheyana Fischer
Chief Nursing Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Health First

5. What Human Experience means to Emory, UCSF Health, and other high-performing organizations 

It’s impossible to overstate how challenging the past few years have been in healthcare. Issues around patient experience, DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging), employee engagement, staff turnover, and more have made it even more apparent that we need a new approach—one that focuses on driving healthcare experiences that are richer, more inclusive, and truly human-centric.  

So we asked healthcare executives across the country what Human Experience means to them, and how they’re using a Human Experience mindset to better serve their communities. We also wanted to learn what processes, protocols, and technologies they’re putting in place to reimagine experiences across the continuum of care, and better connect with individuals. Here’s what they said.

“The Human Experience personalizes healthcare. It really brings out empathy and humbles you, and allows you to really put yourself where those patients are and understand some of the difficult journeys they’re on, and maybe, in some small way, empowers you to make it a little easier for them.”

Cindy Ricciuti-Brown
Director of Experience Design, Insights and Capabilities, UC Davis Health

We’re incredibly proud to work with clients dedicated to finding innovative solutions to transform the experience for patients and staff. Advancing the Human Experience of healthcare must be an all-hands-in effort. To everyone striving to improve the patient experience, no matter where they are in their journey, thank you for your meaningful contributions to the industry, and everyone it impacts. You can explore more of these inspiring stories here.

At Press Ganey, we are committed to improving the Human Experience of healthcare for all. To see firsthand how we can help you reach new levels of patient experience, reach out to a PX expert.