Champions of Change: Improving PX by Focusing on the Three “Controllables”

At BJC Medical Group, our PX Champions program is an extension of our five-person team, enhancing our ability to impact the more than 160 practices we support through virtual meetings and team activities. We started 2025 by focusing on successful communication throughout Q1, a topic we covered in a prior blog post. In Q3 2025, we chose to work on specific areas from our patient experience survey that are often rated low in our clinics including office cleanliness, wait times, and timely return of messages. For each of these topics, we placed importance on elements of each that impact patient perception and focused on what we could control. 

Office Cleanliness 

Data analysis by Press Ganey demonstrated a significant relationship between a patient’s perception of a facility’s cleanliness and their health outcomes outside of the facility. Additionally, patient perception of cleanliness has been linked to other factors of the patient’s experience including staff courtesy/friendliness, whether staff made patients feel comfortable during their visit, and overall staff efficiency.¹ The impact of cleanliness on safety alone created an important call to action for our teams to prioritize cleanliness in their practices. Our team activity this month was a cleanliness scavenger hunt where teams competed within their practice and against other medical group clinics to see who could identify and correct more issues impacting patient perception of cleanliness. Teams submitted before/after photos, and our winning clinic won breakfast and a celebration from our PX team. Additionally, teams were to discuss areas of opportunity with staff courtesy, revisiting conversations from prior months around communication and listening.   

Wait Times 

Wait-time concerns are a common theme among comments correlated with low scores in our PX surveys. It is also an area that clinics often have trouble addressing as they feel it is out of their control. During our meeting, we delivered education around the “12 Principles of Wait,” focusing specifically on those most relevant to our clinics such as anxiety makes waits seem longer, physically uncomfortable waiting feels longer, unexplained waits feel longer than explained waits, and uncertain waits feel longer than known waits. We encouraged our teams to focus on what they can control, i.e., the behaviors they can utilize to positively change the perception of wait time even if the actual wait remains the same. These behaviors include notifying patients in advance of a wait, rounding on patients every 15-20 minutes, and apologizing for a wait at each touchpoint. This month’s activity involved splitting the team into groups, simulating wait time scenarios, and treating one group differently than the other. This created an opportunity for great conversations to identify opportunities within the clinics and how to address them.  

Messages Returned in a Timely Manner 

Our final topic for Q3 was returning messages in a timely manner, an area many clinics struggled with and chose to focus on without truly understanding what impacted the metric. Education focused on tempering the wide range of expectations for what is “timely” and improving patient communication. Suggested behaviors included setting expectations for responses with patients during their visit, keeping patients updated on the status of their message, and enhancing written messaging through elimination of jargon, addressing all questions in the response, and ensuring clear verbiage.  This month’s activity was a play on the “Telephone” game where teams passed along an initial message and identified issues that caused the resulting message to be different. 

Impact of the Program 

Our Champions program continues to contribute to a year-over-year increase in our NPS Likelihood to Recommend Practice score across the medical group and an increase in number of questions scoring above the 60th percentile from before the start of the program to now (see chart below). Beyond the metrics, we have also seen evidence of success through continued growth, with our Champions team surpassing 150 members, and in the engagement of our Champions through maintained meeting attendance numbers. We will look forward to sharing more in future blog posts. If you have any questions or would like additional information, please contact our team at BJCMG_PatientExperience@bjc.org. .

References:

¹ Wright, M. (2023). Being ‘clean’ in 2023: Key drivers of cleanliness in ambulatory surgical and perioperative spaces. Press Ganey. https://info.pressganey.com/press-ganey-blog-healthcare-experience-insights/being-clean-in-2023-key… 

About the author:

Breanna Fuller has spent her entire career in healthcare and feels privileged to have held a variety of roles across the system—from working as a receptionist and medical assistant in the float department of a multi-specialty clinic to serving in operations management across clinical, hospital, and dental settings. In every role, she has witnessed the transformative power of exceptional patient experiences in improving health outcomes and changing lives. Breanna’s passion lies in partnering with providers, growing leaders, strengthening team culture, and creating patient experiences that exceed expectations. In her current (and favorite) role as Patient Experience Partner at BJC Medical Group, she collaborates with an outstanding team—Nick, Petra, Emma, and Abby—to support over 150 clinics and 600 providers.