The Value of Engagement: Contributing, Sharing, and Growing Together

By Russell Senger

I have been at The Beryl Institute for about a year and a half and responsible for Community Development. What does that mean? You might say it means growing the community by bringing in new voices, and you’d be correct. But it’s more than that. It’s really about engaging those new voices and setting them up for success right from the start. That means showing them how our patient experience resources can be of value to their organization but also helping them realize the value they bring to our overall community.

One of my favorite sayings is, “You get out of it what you put in it.” This philosophy sets the foundation for our collaborative community here at the Institute. The content, learnings and all that we do here is community-led. Participation from our global community is how we can collectively continue to build on our core mission of improving the patient experience and our expanded vision of transforming the human experience in healthcare around the world. As a collaborative community, The Beryl Institute is unique, because instead of just telling you the one way to improve experience, we share a roadmap of proven and evidence-based best practices to improve your broader experience efforts and let you decide what is best for your organization.

There are many ways to engage with The Beryl Institute, as described below, and each is equally important to expanding relationships, developing partnerships and maximizing the collaborative nature of our community:

• Tell your teams about the resources they have right at their fingertips. If you are an organizational member of the Institute which provides access to content for every employee in your organization, share that knowledge with others, especially those who might not have patient experience or patient advocacy titles. Perhaps, ambulatory practice leads, building services, food service or your revenue cycle management department could benefit from knowing about appropriate content just for them.

  For example, do your volunteer professionals leaders know they have access to a special interest community set up just for volunteers? This might be timely information to share with them as organizations start to bring back volunteer programs into care settings.

• Share and participate in community feedback. Since 2011, The Beryl Institute has released a biennial report, “State of Patient Experience,” a survey providing direct community feedback on patient experience efforts. This open-access report is one of the many resources you can share with your entire network and is a great way to keep executive leadership engaged in the patient experience conversation. Other ways to participate include joining any of our community conversations, webinars or topic calls. Also, we often seek participants for focus groups for our white papers, which is another way to share feedback and best practices.
• Share your stories. If you have a positive story about improving patient experience within your organization, share that knowledge through our multiple avenues of distribution. If you enjoy sharing your stories in front of people, our Call for Submissions for ELEVATE PX 2022 will open this summer (and yes, the conference will be in-person in Indianapolis, IN). If the written word is more your style, then there are opportunities to contribute to our library of case studies and guest blogs or to share your learnings through PX Connect.

I am extremely grateful to be a part of The Beryl Institute and to have the opportunity to serve the community by engaging new voices from all over the world. I look forward to personally engaging with each of you, learning about your organization and sharing your contributions so we can grow the community together.

Russell Senger
Vice President, Community Development
The Beryl Institute