Thomas Lee, MD, has more than three decades of experience in healthcare performance improvement, serving as a primary care physician and a past leader at Boston-based Partners HealthCare.
Today, Dr. Lee serves as CMO of Press Ganey and recently spoke with Becker's about the most important lesson he's learned on delivering excellent patient experience.
Here's what he had to say:
"This is my big epiphany, which I only figured out in my 50s: You are starting by scratch with every single patient.
"Great athletes find a way to concentrate and be at their best every single day. In medicine, it's with every single patient. It doesn't matter how wonderful you may have been in the past. Everything depends on how you're going to be with the next patient you see.
"The effort to improve patient experience is really about creating a context in which caregivers feel supported and motivated to be at their best with every single patient. It's about the future, not the past. It's about being highly reliable at being empathic. This perspective was useful for me, and I think it's the right one for healthcare."
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