Effective Ambulatory Quality Initiative Improves Patient Experience

Mary Washburn, MD, MPH | Care Experience Physician Champion, Kaiser Permanente
Natalie Whitlock, MSHCA | Care Experience Leader, Kaiser Permanente

Patient experience is a critical health care imperative nationwide. Improving both outpatient and inpatient service provided to patients is vital to health care organizations. Most published patient experience initiatives focus on the inpatient setting. Multiple interactions affect ambulatory patient experience and perceived quality of care. Development of an effective generalizable outpatient training initiative is often difficult and formulation of a tracking program to demonstrate effectiveness of a program is equally difficult. This webinar shares an ambulatory quality improvement initiative employed across a large, diverse health care system. This initiative demonstrated immediate and six month sustained improvement in patient satisfaction scores in the ambulatory setting. This session will review strategies to successfully negotiate the challenges of implementing a generalizable training initiative across a diverse ambulatory arena.