Becker's asked chief pharmacy officers from hospitals and health systems across the U.S. to share their ideas to boost the patient experience.
The 13 executives featured in this article are all speaking at the Becker's Healthcare Chief Pharmacy Officer Summit, from Nov. 13-14, at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago.
To learn more about this event, click here.
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As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who will speak at our conference. The following are answers from our speakers at the event.
Question: What are you doing to boost the patient experience?
Ryan Mezinger. Senior Vice President and Chief Pharmacy Officer of MetroHealth (Cleveland): At MetroHealth, we are ensuring medication is accessible and affordable for the medications our patients deserve to have the best possible outcome. Our pharmacy team works tirelessly to assist patients and improve their cost of medications to make them affordable. Our pharmacies are providing a personalized pharmacy experience rather than the more common transitional that they have become accustomed to. We want the patient to know that we are working in collaboration with their providers to provide a 360-patient centric care model to help them live their best life. We have opened 11 patient pharmacies and provide free home delivery to ensure they have access to their medications to stay adherent on their treatment. For our pharmacy teams, we have provided state of the art technology to improve our bandwidth and turnaround time for processing prescriptions and minimize any patient waiting for prescriptions. We are working on giving the patients a pharmacy experience they deserve and should expect.
Nilesh Desai, RPh. Chief Pharmacy Officer of Baptist Health System (San Antonio): Our goal is to provide the following:
- Increase and ease medication access for our patients
- Provide safe and quality care
- Be available when the patients need to talk to a clinician
- Follow up with our patients
Amy Gutierrez. Vice President and Chief Pharmacy Officer of UCHealth (Aurora, Colo.): At UCHealth, we have been very focused on improving digital pharmacy transparency for patients, allowing them access to reliable status updates for their outpatient/specialty pharmacy prescriptions, knowing when to pick up prescriptions or expect delivery. Access to transparent information supports our mission to improve medication access and adherence, patient experience, and supporting a decision to select our pharmacies for their care. Patients have high levels of expectations given the overall advances around us with digital transformation. Providing that same level of service is critical to our patients, particularly as we support their ability to make informed decisions.
Trisha Jordan, PharmD. Chief Pharmacy Officer of Wexner Medical Center, The Ohio State University (Columbus): At The Ohio State Wexner Medical Center, we believe pharmacy plays a crucial role in enhancing the patient experience by significantly improving medication access. We’ve leaned into expanding our reach in this space, knowing improving access directly enhances patient satisfaction by reducing the financial burden associated with prescriptions. By offering medication assistance programs, leveraging drug repository services, and streamlining prior authorization processes, we ensure our patients have the medications needed to improve their health and minimize delays in receiving necessary treatments. These initiatives ensure that patients can obtain their medications more affordably and efficiently, leading to greater peace of mind and a more positive healthcare experience.
Sebastian Hamilton, PharmD. Chief Pharmacy Officer of Operations and Community/Ambulatory Partnerships at Boston Medical Center: An effective way to develop and sustain ongoing efforts to deliver and ideally improve patient experience is to start with your patient facing teams. It has been well established the strong correlation between engaged team members and the resulting effect on patient experience; which is not overly surprising since these two groups are incessantly interacting with each other. More than just saying, but organically expressing how much team members are valued at every level of the organization coupled with conveying a clear understanding of the important role they play in executing many systemwide goals and especially as it relates to patient experience.
It's important to tie these goals to the mission of the organization, to what will intrinsically motivate the team to deliver the best patient experience at each encounter. Being a mindful leader and advocate in favor of these motivators, e.g. recognition, rounding, competitive salaries, etc., are great motivators that are well worth the effort and investment that will reduce team turnover and engage teams to deliver great patient experiences.
Will Carroll, PharmD. Vice President of Network Pharmacy at Hackensack Meridian Health (Edison, N.J.): This is an area of focus not only in the acute care setting but also ambulatory spaces. In the hospital setting, we are optimizing pharmacy's involvement with medication access and education to directly impact patient experience. In the ambulatory care space, we have several different strategies: Our post-acute care pharmacy provides discharge medication services to patients in our owned nursing home facilities.
Our specialty pharmacy uses patient satisfaction surveys to gauge the impact of our focused initiatives (i.e. decreasing medication wait times, minimizing call abandonment rates, reducing call hold times and enrollment in savings programs). We also have ScriptCenters in most of our hospitals to allow for 24 hour prescription pick up. Lastly, our population health pharmacy team focuses on patient engagement and education to improve satisfaction and outcomes. This team has taken the lead on some of our harm reduction strategies to connect patients with needed resources.
Nicole Shoquist. Chief Pharmacy Officer of JPS Health Network (Fort Worth, Texas): At JPS Health Network, we are very focused cultivating relationships with our patients to deliver a supportive and seamless patient experience at every step — starting in the provider office, from first fill to final fill. And for us that means meeting our patients where they are.
Whether that's through our digital engagement tools that offer customized engagements to match patient communication preference; connecting patients to financial assistance programs to ensure access and improve adherence; or by leveraging one of our extended pharmacy care services like free home delivery to make "pickup" easier.
In some cases, meeting the patient where they are is a higher-touch approach, as was the case recently when one of our care liaisons was working with a patient who needed updated labs in advance of their next medication refill. The liaison learned that the patient hadn't yet made the lab appointment, so he warmly transferred the patient to the scheduling department to get that set-up and ensure the patient was able to get their next refill on time.
These are just a few examples of what we are doing at JPS to enhance the patient experience and deliver exceptional care to everyone in our community.
Melanie Joe, PharmD. Chief Pharmacy Officer of UCI Health (Orange, Calif.); Associate Director and Founding Associate Dean of Pharmacy Professional Affairs, University of California, Irvine, School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences: UCI Health Pharmacy is focused on improving the patient experience with provision of medications in an accurate, safe, and timely manner. Our pharmacists play an integral role in furnishing drug information, performing medication management, and consultation to ensure appropriateness of medication therapy, adherence to treatment plans, and minimization of adverse effects. As part of the UCI Health Transitions of Care, Meds to Beds, and medication therapy management programs, our pharmacists enhance the patient experience and positively impact outcomes via personalized, direct patient encounters.
Joseph Pinto. Vice President of Pharmacy Operations at Mount Sinai Health System (New York City): Our population health pharmacy team has been recognized for best practice on multiple occasions for their work with remote patient monitoring relating to hypertension, diabetes, maternal health, nephrology, and pulmonology. The team's interventions in managing the patient's medication and disease state has improved patient outcomes and the overall patient experience.
On our inpatient units we have positioned our pharmacists to work on specific units focusing on quality measures such as readmissions and HCAHP survey questions specifically:
- Before giving you any new medicine, how often did hospital staff tell you what the medicine was for?
- Before giving you any new medicine, how often did hospital staff describe possible side effects in a way you could understand?
In addition we have a pharmacy TOC team that is involved with patient discharges and follow up.
We have found that having our pharmacists and pharmacy techs on the units available to our patients and care teams improves the overall medication management workflow which lends to an improved patient experience.
Martin J. Torres, PharmD. Director of Pharmacy, Quality, Safety, Education, and Research at UC Irvine Medical Center (Orange, Calif.): We have an Office of Patient Experience at UCI Health which strives to ensure patients receive high-quality care and have positive experiences by placing patients at the center of everything we do.
Although these current initiatives are good, we are raising the bar at UCI Health by embarking on a journey to high reliability in partnership with Press Ganey. By messaging zero harm as part of the overall patient experience, we hope to hardwire a transformational culture shift by promoting safety as a core value to drive compassionate, collaborative, and human centered care. Developing into a high reliable organization will not happen overnight, but on behalf of our patients and staff, our medical center and physician leadership teams welcome the challenge!
Adetoro Oriaifo, PharmD. Chief Pharmacy Officer of Total Health Care, Inc. (Baltimore): At Total Health Care pharmacies, we have implemented several strategies to enhance the patient experience. We offer specialized services such as medication adherence programs, medication synchronization, and medication therapy management to ensure patients receive optimal care. Our pharmacies provide free medication delivery, making it convenient for patients to access their prescriptions. Total Health Care pharmacy also emphasizes personalized care, with staff committed to improving medication adherence and resolving insurance issues promptly. Additionally, we have introduced an express prescription refill system accessible via a mobile app or web refill allowing patients to easily manage their medications. These efforts align with Total Health Care's mission to improve health and quality of life in the communities we serve.
Danielle Griggs, PharmD. Chief Pharmacy Officer of UVA Health (Charlottesville, Va.): Patient experience is a key pillar of the UVA Health 10-year strategic plan. Within the UVA Health Pharmacy Ambulatory Network of 10 pharmacies across central Virginia, we are optimizing patient communication, leveraging the newest functionality in Epic communication tools and direct-to-patient 2-way communication integration. We are focused on how patients want to receive communications about their prescriptions, and how we can meet patient’s expectations.
UVA Health is expanding capacity for ambulatory fulfillment for specialty, retail, and home delivery prescriptions through implementation of the latest automation and conveyance technology, to increase access for patients. Through the implementation of the Pharmacy Central Services Center, we will increase fulfillment capacity 4-fold, centralize call-center operations, and optimize medication inventory management, benefiting patients of all UVA Health pharmacies. This investment in the latest technology, will enable our pharmacies to provide the operational, medication access, and clinical support services needed to optimize patient outcomes.