Walk With Me: From Wayfinding to Wellness

By Rebecca Cooper-Piela, MS, APRN-BC, CHCQM

The experience of COVID and multiple system changes brought significant transformations to healthcare, and our health system was no exception. We faced several challenges, including financial pressures, staff issues, and a high reliance on a travel-based workforce. I am proud to say that our teams have worked tirelessly on improving our operations, financial performance, and recruitment and retention efforts. With these important foundational pieces in place, we now find ourselves poised to reinvigorate our work around patient experience.

As part of this initiative, we have transitioned support for patient experience from a regional system level back to a local level, led by our quality team. Our quality team understands the importance of providing outstanding experience for our patients and actively monitors our performance for HCHAPS, CHAPS for MIPs, OASCHAPS, and our NRC survey vendor data. 

The healthcare system we support includes a 188-bed acute care hospital, a multi-specialty provider group of more than 300 providers including embedded tertiary providers on site and an ambulatory surgery center. The teams across our system are dedicated to supporting our mission and delivering high-quality care to the communities we serve.  We recognize that our patients’ experience spans our entire system and that it is imperative that patients receive a seamless and consistent response wherever they are receiving care.

Our philosophy is that all team members, both providing direct patient-facing care or non-direct patient support, play an integral role in the quality of care delivered and in shaping the patient experience. With this in mind, we developed a campaign with a unifying mantra to engage all team members: Walk With Me. This idea supports the relaunch of our patient experience efforts.

Our initial focus will be on helping patients and visitors with wayfinding assistance on our campus. Rather than offering just verbal directions, we will encourage team members to walk alongside patients to their intended destination. This is a simple way that all team members can be involved and provide a meaningful impact enhancing the patient experience.

As our efforts evolve, Walk With Me will come to represent walking with the patient throughout their entire healthcare journey. Our goal is to help team members remember to place themselves “in the shoes of our patients” as they navigate diagnoses, prognoses, and challenges related to social care factors impacting their healthcare journey.

We have established an executive steering committee to support this work, and we are very excited to work with The Beryl Institute as we launch this new journey. As the next step, our staff will be invited to engage in The Beryl Institute’s Experience Assessment, an evaluation that will create a comprehensive picture of our strengths and opportunities we have to improve the patient experience. After this, we look forward to welcoming Stacy Palmer, Senior Vice President and COO at The Beryl Institute, to spend a day with our teams evaluating the results and discussing areas of improvement based the book she co-authored with Jason Wolf, the CEO at The Beryl Institute, The Return on Human Experience: Eight Principles to Inspire Excellence in Healthcare.

From there, we will develop local councils with workstreams to address identified needs and employ the tools shared with us. I look forward to this important work and cannot wait to see where our journey takes us.

Our guiding principle throughout this journey will sustain us: Walk With Me. 

About The Author:
Rebecca oversees quality and accreditation programs, value-based care initiatives, accountable care teams, and care coordination. A certified expert in healthcare quality management, Rebecca joined Foundation Medical Partners in 1995 as an adult nurse practitioner and has held multiple leadership roles, including Medical Director for Quality Assurance. She holds both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nursing from Boston College. Southern New Hampshire Health includes a 300+ provider medical group, a 188-bed acute care hospital, and an ambulatory surgical center.