The Jackson Organization is excited to announce that the 2007 Annual Creating Excellence in Healthcare Conference will be at the fabulous Sheraton Music City Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, October 21-23, 2007. We will again offer the popular pre-conference workshop on October 21 that will help you make the most of your research.

You can learn more about this amazing hotel at http://www.sheratonmusiccity.com. The Sheraton Music City Hotel offers a wide variety of amenities, including oversized guest rooms (each with a private balcony or patio), business services, concierge service, health club facilities, indoor and outdoor pools, high-speed wireless internet access, tennis, free parking and a complimentary airport shuttle. Located within minutes of downtown Nashville, The Grand Ole Opry, Opry Mills Shopping Mall, and Nashville International Airport, the hotel is ideally located. The Jackson Organization has secured a reduced room rate of $149.00 per night for single or double occupancy.

This year’s Creating Excellence in Healthcare Conference is timed to allow for attending Custom Learning Systems Group’s (our strategic partner) 8th Annual HealthCare Service Excellence Conference, held October 24-26, 2007 at the same hotel. That’s six continuous days of best practices, engaging and informative speakers, access to experts, and networking with colleagues around the nation—with everything focused on creating excellence in healthcare. To learn more about Custom Learning System Groups and their annual conference, click here. Keep watching for a special combined price announcement for those wishing to participate in both conferences!

We encourage those that have implemented innovative programs, made improvements in their scores, or positively impacted business outcomes to consider presenting. Give us your ideas for a presentation by responding to our Call for Papers. Last year, we had so many submissions that we were not able to accept all of them—so we encourage all those interested to submit as early as possible.

Wednesday, March 28th

Presented by:
Lloyd Berry
Senior Vice President and Consultant
The Jackson Organization

This webinar will focus on the benefits and best practices of conducting focus groups after an employee survey. Focus groups are an invaluable tool in getting the "why" behind the "what" of quantitative employee surveys, allowing you to discover the hidden emotional and environmental factors that drove the survey response of your employees.

In just 60 minutes, Lloyd Berry will reveal proven best practices for employee focus groups:

• What you'll gain from follow-up employee focus groups
• How to organize, recruit, and conduct employee focus groups
• How to respond to, share, and act upon the focus group results
• Success stories from hospitals that have achieved great results

Date: Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Time: 2:00-3:00 ET
Forum: Online webinar
Cost: $99 per log-in - the number of participants per log-in is unlimited -- Clients save $50 and pay only $49! Email us at info@jacksonorganization.com for the special client invitation code.

Registration Required. Click the link below to register online. Payment is required at the time of registration via credit card. Instructions on accessing the webinar will be provided with your registration confirmation.

Register Online Now

RML Specialty Hospital
Hinsdale, Illinois

How do you build trust with leadership? How can you get employees to be your ambassadors to the community? RML Specialty Hospital of Hinsdale, Illinois managed to tackle these issues and more with resounding success. In the latest employee survey, leadership was rated in the 99th percentile, and the areas of benefits, communication, and community orientation all saw incredible scores. The employees have become highly satisfied, engaged, and dedicated ambassadors for RML Specialty Hospital. How would you like to have evangelists like these at your hospital?

At the beginning of April 2007, version 3.2 of StatData™ will replace the 3.1 version. We’ve listened carefully to the feedback we’ve received. You wanted additional reports, increased report customization abilities, and the ability to track completion rates in real-time at the unit-specific level. Our expert programmers have added a wide range of performance improvements, new reports, and new reporting options—and they added a few enhancements that you didn’t even know you needed yet!

StatData 3.2 provides unprecedented flexibility and precision-control of your data. The new features and benefits of StatData 3.2 include:

New Reports

• HCAHPS Report Card by Question Category
The HCAHPS Report Card provides the user with a detailed Mean Summary Report Card using the CMS-defined question categories.
• HCAHPS Top Box Report Card by Question Category
The HCAHPS Top Box Report Card provides the user with a detailed Top Box Summary Report Card using the CMS-defined question categories.
• Positioning Analysis
Focus on the most important attributes to get the biggest return on your investment of time and resources. The new Positioning Analysis creates a two dimensional map of the performance attributes being measured, using the relative performance and importance of the items to plot their position on the map.
• Interview Completes by Treatment Area
See how each unit has been doing against target quotas for completed surveys, right up to the current day. This report displays the sample plan for each project component and a 5-period trend of completed interviews, plus the number of completed surveys for each project component in ongoing surveys.

StatData Enhancements
• As an added project option, Voice of the Patient transcriptions will be available online via StatData; clients currently receiving Voice of the Patient transcriptions will be able to access them online
• Reports now allow scale flip for calculating Yes/No question mean and correlation
• Dig deep into your data—Sub-unit database comparisons now available upon request
• Get your “printer-friendly” reports in Microsoft Word document format
• You can now copy and modify previously saved reports—no need to reinvent the wheel when you’ve already created a similar report
• Top Box Jackson Database Score and Top Box Percentiles added to the drop-down options
• The “Available Reports” drop-down menu has been alphabetized
• Convenient links to “StatData News” and “Log Out” have been added to the menu bar


Any questions or concerns relating to the new StatData 3.2 release should be sent to webmaster@jacksonorganization.com.

"We’ve been looking at cost and response rates for mail and telephone for patient survey administration. Are there any other factors we should consider?

By Scott MacStravic, Ph.D., for HealthLeaders News, Jan. 19, 2007

One of the key elements in customer relationship management is the concept and measure called “return on customer,” reflecting the financial value of each and all customers served by an enterprise, whether consumers or business clients. This idea has been at least partly incorporated by healthcare organizations, which must at least consider whether their current customer mix--in terms of the average “return on patient” value to the organization--tends to promote prosperity, difficulty or disaster.

Full Article

This month’s “Around the Office” will introduce you to the talented Field Services Team of The Jackson Organization. Much like chefs, you don’t actually see them all that often. Field services are made up of tasks whose existence is seldom noticed, but their absence would be glaring. “In Field Services, we are responsible for sample loading, programming, response coding, and quality control. If everything runs smoothly on our end, you’ll notice that everything runs smoothly on your end as well,” said Geri Gage, Senior Programmer. “Our team is made up of dedicated professionals who will stop at nothing to get the job done right.”

Sample Loading: Fred Kramer, Data Specialist, and Akber Zuberi, Sample Specialist, are responsible for getting contact lists from hospitals. These lists precisely define who will be contacted for a particular study. “Whether we are working with an expert IT team or someone who doesn’t know a thing about transferring sample lists, our job is to get it done, no matter what,” said Kramer. “We know that hospitals are busy delivering healthcare, after all. It’s our job to make the survey process simple.” Bobbi Rogers, HCAHPS Coordinator, is responsible for all HCAHPS projects, including sample loading. “HCAHPS has a constantly changing landscape of requirements and processes. We work with each client to create patient lists for HCAHPS studies that meet CMS requirements. Many of our clients that were previously trying to manage HCAHPS on their own have been shocked to see how easy we make the process,” said Ms. Rogers.

Programming: The Jackson Organization’s programmers (Geri Gage, Russ Stumpf, Dina Feinberg, Mike Boon, Earl Henson, Fred Kramer, and Ola Onolaja) are notorious perfectionists that actually get excited about flowcharts and calculations and endless lines of code. “We create everything here from the ground up. Our clients have unique issues facing them, so each one needs a unique solution. Whether it’s programming a web survey or a CATI (Computer Assisted Telephone Interview) study, we build exactly what the client needs,” said Mike Boon, CATI/IVR Programmer. “My colleagues are top-notch, cream of the crop programmers—no matter who is working on your project, you’re in good hands.”

Coding: When patients or consumers provide a response to an open-ended question, Field Services makes sure that each response is complete and accurate. Carol Jack, Data Processing Assistant, ensures that each response is properly coded—which often takes a little old-fashioned investigation. “For example, we’ll get responses from consumers that mention hospitals with names even the client doesn’t recognize at times. With a little checking around, we’ll find that a hospital in the area changed its name in the previous year. It’s important to get the most up to date and accurate information to the client for each and every open-ended response,” said Ms. Jack.

Quality Control: “The best clock on the planet isn’t worth much if it doesn’t tell the proper time,” said James Miller, Quality Assurance Specialist. “This isn’t about getting things mostly right—it’s about getting things exactly right. We check and double-check every aspect of every survey process, whether it’s paper, phone, or web. We explore every possible way that a respondent could answer, so that any logic problems are discovered well before putting the survey in the field. We also work closely with the interviewers, making sure that they aren’t experiencing any difficulties with the survey. The interviewers are often the ones to discover a great way to improve the survey process.”