Quality and Patient Safety Annual Report 2017 Quality & Safety Annual Report 2017 | Page 40

IMPROVING THE PATIENT EXPERIENCE BY THE NUMBERS 38 Delivering High-Quality Care through Enhanced Communication The Office of Patient Experience and Engagement (OPXE) agrees that providing high-quality care starts with effective communication between patients and caregivers. In 2017, we were awarded a UA Health Services Foundation General Endowment Fund grant to begin the Advanced Communication Training (ACT) Institute. Some 11 caregivers were selected to participate in an in-depth training program led by Vital Talks. This program teaches caregivers how to become master communicators. In 2018, this hand-selected group of caregivers will be working to share their expertise across UAB Medicine to strengthen our commitment to an exceptional experience for all patients and families. In April 2017, we hosted our second annual Patient Experience Week, which featured educational sessions for leaders and caregivers to learn more about delivering exceptional experiences to patients and families. We were excited to host a number of keynote speakers such as Noah Galloway, Rich Bluni, and Tom Lee. In addition to keynote speakers, we hosted two impactful panel discussions. One focused on hearing the voices of our patients and families. Employees who have been patients and members of our Patient and Family Advisory Council shared their stories of exceptional care. The other was a panel of UAB Medicine providers discussing how they have owned the patient experience. This panel was so successful that it has been scheduled as a grand rounds topic in 2018. ‘Know Your Doctor’ Campaign In 2017, our patients told us how important it is to know who their doctor is while they are an inpatient. In response to this request, Gary Jones, our inpatient experience coach, led a project in connection with the UAB Medicine Hospitalist Service to better communicate with patients and family members about the physician who would be providing their care. The “Know Your Doctor” campaign was a great success, and Jones’ work was selected as a poster at the national What’s Right in Healthcare meeting in August. Building Trusting Relationships with Patients and Families During 2017, OPXE partnered with Cipher Health to launch a new digital rounding application called Orchid. Orchid is helping leaders and staff hear the voice of our patients in real time while simplifying work. This digital rounding application has disrupted many paper-based processes, making data collection, auditing, and reporting faster and easier. John Dodd from OPXE led this initiative across UAB Medicine. To date, UAB Medicine leaders and employees have completed over 74,000 rounds on patients and families. In addition, there are over 30 individual scripts loaded into the tool. This represents a significant savings in paper and time. UAB Medicine is garnering national attention for how quickly we leveraged this technology for enhanced patient listening and innovation. Patient-Centric Processes Bedside shift reports have long been a best practice among many health care facilities. In 2017, Gary Jones, our inpatient coach, received the charge from our chief nursing officer to implement the process across UAB Hospital and UAB Hospital-Highlands. The bedside shift report process allows nursing to hand off from shift to shift in front of the patient, which includes the patient in the care process. It also allows for vital safety checks to help reduce medication errors while improving other quality metrics. Training and validation classes started at UAB Hospital-Highlands, allowing nursing staff to perform simulations of bedside shift reports and review what could be improved. Once the training was completed, nurse managers were tasked to validate whether key behaviors were being practiced in their units. UAB Quality and Safety Annual Report