Leader rounding is critical to patient care, outcomes and experience. However, traditional rounding practices often fall short of providing the insights organizations need to deliver excellent results.
During an August Becker's Hospital Review podcast sponsored by NRC Health, two NRC Health leaders — Katie Haifley, product director and co-founder of Nobl Health, and Jon Tanner, senior product director — discussed how innovative solutions can upgrade the rounding process and address common challenges.
Three key insights were:
1. Rounding allows leaders to gain better visibility into and improve the patient experience. The core elements of patient experience include quality of care, patient safety, staff engagement and patient satisfaction. In this context, rounding serves to inquire and obtain feedback about the patient experience and to improve it.
"Those organizations that have really mastered rounding do both," Ms. Haifley said. "They seek to listen and inquire and use that information to make improvements that same day, and also long term." She highlighted that making rounding part of nurse leaders' everyday managerial duties is one of those long-term improvements that provider organizations should strive for.
2. Traditional rounding practices focus on understanding the immediate patient experience within the four walls of the hospital. This narrow focus on the current patient experience prevents organizations from gaining greater insight into the patient journey by looking more holistically both before and after the clinical encounter. Yet, learning about any challenges or friction that patients may face when searching for care, scheduling appointments or paying for services can provide opportunities for improving the overall patient experience.
Another common challenge is that rounding is often seen as a nice-to-have process that takes a second seat to other priorities. "As soon as things get busy or the Department of Health comes for a visit, rounding is the first thing that drops by the wayside," Mr. Tanner noted.
3. The combined strength of NRC Health and Nobl lies in enabling a holistic view of the patient journey and hardwiring rounding practices. NRC Health's Experience capabilities round out healthcare organizations' traditionally narrow view into the patient journey by providing a complete map of the pre-, during- and post-care parts of that journey.
Putting a more comprehensive dataset of patient experience insights into nurse leaders' hands feeds directly into the role of the Nobl Rounding Platform, which enables organizations to counter the tendency of deprioritizing patient rounding by hardwiring rounding processes into day-to-day workflows. Using AI algorithms, the platform also makes rounding more predictive and prescriptive (which is where knowing more about patients' past experiences comes in).
"We have integration set up where we ingest past patient experience data — whether that's real time or HCAHPS data — so when you are rounding on a patient, you can see what their last scores and comments were and use that information in the context of their journey right now," Ms. Haifley explained. "If a patient had a really stellar experience in the past and mentioned what went well, you can try to do the same thing this hospital stay, or if they had mentioned something in the past that could be improved upon, you can bring that to the table and make sure that doesn't happen again."