From conversations about surveying, data, engaging staff, talking with doctors, dealing with senior leaders, no subject about helping patients understand and navigate their relationship with healthcare is off-limits.
Joe lives by the motto, Always Serious, Never Somber. He thinks that because the work is hard, the journey is long, and the stakes are high, one must embrace the joy or lose the fire necessary to fuel the passion.
He will acknowledge that he is easily distracted if asked about music, his dogs or the Chicago Cubs.
Archive of Essays on Patient Experience Theory & Practice
Archive of Essays on PX Organization and Structure
Archive of Essays on Statistics and Visualizations
Archive of Essays on Surveying and Design
Archive of Essays on Assorted Other Topics
Getting people to adopt new processes to improve experiences starts with addressing their fear that they don’t have the time to improve.
Communication can become muddy when people infer unintended meaning from words.
The gap between perceptions and reality, or facts and their meaning can drive a failure to communicate between patients and providers.
Why does it seem like we end up in bad places when all that we do seems to make sense in the moment?
Communications can spiral and generate more heat than light, when people lean heavily on stereotypes and past experiences.
When we complain about the shortcomings of others, are we really defining our own outsized expectations?
Realize that all work faces the patient, even if you never talk to one.
Reframe your discussions about patient experience to make sure you are responsive to your audience’s needs.
If PX work is not integrated with the work and messaging of a system, it will be treated as fluff and not truly important.
Failure is an outcome with many possible causes. Diagnosing the reasons can prevent making the same mistake twice.
Whether talking to an audience or a single person or patient, focus on putting their wants and needs at the forefront of any communication.
Too often speakers ask audiences lazy questions or ones to further the speech rather than engage with the audience.
Redirecting blame-and-shame energy starts with considering how you talk about who is responsible.
It may seem odd, but being data-driven and science-driven are not the same thing and can lead one to different places.
Failure to effectively communicate on effective communication can lead to ineffective communication.
Even organizations that imagine themselves as collaborative seem to drag people to the woodshed for beatings when scores decline. Why?
Lessons on patient experience are all around us, even in places that aren’t obvious.
When setting foundational work covering all employees, organizations are not always structured to be successful.
It may be hard to believe, but healthcare has low self-esteem and it is preventing it from improving its experience.
While a commitment to being nice is laudatory, it is often a slippery concept that is difficult to attain.
While AI can be a boon, without attentive oversight, its use can be misguided, illegal, or off-putting.
Question construction seems deceptively easy. Questions that provide actionable results require attention to detail.
People obsess with survey length when they should be focused on survey value and reducing the obstacles to participation.
Before setting out to create and execute a survey, one should determine if it is the right move or just an obvious wrong move.
“Be nice” cannot be the objective of a successful service action plan because it lacks the substance required to be a useful action plan.
Part of your task is convincing to leadership how hard lasting change is, even as you convince staff how easy it is to change.
Some see the pursuit of perfection as an effort to provide crystal clarity, but this often makes things less clear.
We know why we fail, but why can’t we avoid those points of failure?
Before we get upset in the defensiveness of others, let us understand our own defensiveness.
Here are the questions you should answer before asking other people survey questions.
Messaging from leaders that failures will be punished and successes will be forgotten underscores why so much PX work flounders.
The road to data hell often begins with, “Just run a simple survey to verify compliance.”
Of all the organizational options for PX, what are the best options in my option? Here they are.
Where organizations put PX will define what PX looks like and what they will spend their time doing. Choose wisely.
PX can be marginalized because systems don’t know how to integrate it.
We need to be smarter, but we also need to hold those who seek to inform us to higher standards.
How people process large numbers affects how they process healthcare outcomes and decisions.
One big gap between clinicians and patients is how they understand and process math. This failure to communicate can lead to suboptimal outcomes.
We say we are not perfect and don’t expect perfection, even as we seem to demand it in everything.
While it feels like everyone loves us or hates us, that is not the reality of survey data.
Too often hospitals fail to use the right language to connect clinicians and staff with service and experience work.
In all the talk about providing unique experiences to patients, one should ask if this is what patients really want.
While we judge our patients for their misconceptions, we should spare a moment to evaluate our own misconceptions.
Your desire to use patient comments to motivate and inspire starts with picking the right ones.
Reviewing physician comments through patient eyes.
People often put more stock in patient comments than survey data, but often in the wrong ways.
If you don’t target specific messages in your praise and critique, don’t assume that your team is picking up on the nuance.
PX Matters with Joseph Snipp 