Many healthcare quality leaders agree; improving the patient experience is important, but that's not to say that it's always easy. An online poll of more than 250 healthcare quality leaders conducted by ASQ found three challenges that make implementing patient experience initiatives difficult.
Highlighted below are three hurdles survey respondents ranked as "very difficult" to overcome.
- Documentation-heavy payment and regulatory systems that take the care team away from the patient (47 percent)
- Fragmented, uncoordinated patient care, including multiple hand-offs, communication barriers and the lack of a nationally integrated healthcare information system (46 percent)
- Governance and senior leadership that are not supportive and set a poor example for staff engagement (45 percent)
"Healthcare is a complex, interconnected system of processes that have been built and layered with additional requirements over time," said Susan Peiffer, chair-elect of ASQ's healthcare division and performance improvement specialist for the Western Wisconsin division of the Springfield, Ill.-based Hospital Sisters Health System. "Add complicated patient issues to the mix and one can understand the ongoing quality and service challenges."