A Call to Action: The Global Inquiry on Measuring Experience

by Jason A. Wolf, Ph.D., CPXP

Welcome to the latest issue of Transforming Human Experience and a special call to action inspired by the very idea of what matters we discussed in our last issue. (And I do hope you all checked out the new home for the What Matters to You Global Movement on The Beryl Institute site here: https://theberylinstitute.org/what-matters-to-you/). I’ll start with the invitation – we continue to engage healthcare sites around the world to participate in a global inquiry that could change how we ask what matters and identify where good practice is taking place to positively impact the human experience all around the world. I invite you to join us.

To further explain this invitation, I want to share a story about a community call to action – the Global Experience Measure (GXM) inquiry. This effort was inspired by an article published in the Patient Experience Journal in April 2022 entitled, Measuring what matters: A proposal for reframing how we evaluate and improve experience in healthcare (https://pxjournal.org/journal/vol9/iss1/2/) . The article suggested it was time to reframe experience measurement for the future and offered a few initial considerations on what measurement can and must be. Three consideration include:

1. Focus on what matters to patients, family members and care partners to better understand and act on what is important to them.
2. Reconsider survey structures and processes to lessen the burden, increase timeliness and ensure broad applicability.
3. Establish more effective and meaningful avenues for benchmarking to support expanded accountability, drive clear action and foster broad-based learning and improvement.

Ultimately the article called for “a collaborative coalition of voices from across the global healthcare ecosystem – from patients, family members and care partners to healthcare professionals, vendors and measurement experts – to convene and commit to co-design the future together.” That is exactly what the GXM inquiry is meant to do.

The GXM inquiry is a community inspired, and driven project built on the idea that we can work collaboratively to identify and understand where positive and impactful practice is taking place to provide the best in experience in healthcare organizations around the world. The premise is that through a short set of common questions we can determine where people are realizing experience success and then create an expansive and rapid means to identify and share proven practices and actions that people are taking to transform the human experience in healthcare.

Since June 2022, over 1000 members of The Beryl Institute’s global community have contributed to steps leading to this inquiry phase. The effort has been guided by a global steering team with members from 6 continents who have overseen the following actions:

• Eight community conversation circles, engaging more than 500 people, were held to confirm what the community was asking for in the development of a common global experience measure.
• Draft items were reviewed with the community via an extensive validation survey, asking people to identify the items of greatest importance to them. Almost 400 people from 13 countries provided feedback on the model and identified items of greatest importance.
• A follow-up survey was completed by 200 more community members, reinforcing the desire for a common measure set, a complementary workforce focused survey a resource center to support these efforts.

If you wish to learn more about the project, an overview informational video can be found here: https://theberylinstitute.org/product/engage-in-the-global-experience-measure-inquiry/

These efforts lead us back to my invitation above to join the sites already committed to carry out this call to action. Members of the community on 6 continents are already contributing data from the voices of the patients and families we serve. We hope you will join us.

So why is this important overall? Some thoughts to leave you with:

1. We do not wish, nor should we seek to create more surveys, but rather better ways to understand what matters to people.
2. We need a better way to identify where great work is happening around the world, so we can share its impact and learn forward together. Especially from the places we may have not yet looked.
3. No one country, system, structure, or model has all the answers, but together we can weave together a brilliant tapestry of solutions for the future of healthcare.
4. I continue to say that wherever I have been honored to stand in the world with our community, we have one common ground – we are ALL human beings. And even with our differences socially, demographically, economically, and more, we all share that one powerful commonality – our humanity. My hope is we can build on and thrive from that idea. This is especially critical now more than ever.

So please join the thousands who have already engaged in this effort and honor the voices of the thousands and thousands we each serve in healthcare today. This is an opportunity to find possibility, and we must not relent in the pursuit of something that will make us all better in the end.

If you are interested in participating you can reach out directly to me (Jason A. Wolf, Ph.D., CPXP) or Brittany Lax from the Institute. We hope you will join us.