It’s Official: CMS Makes HCAHPS Mandatory to Receive Full Payments

According to CMS’ press release on November 1, 2006, hospitals will be required to participate in HCAHPS to receive a full payment update. Also, hospitals must report risk-adjusted outcome measures to receive the full payment update, including 30-day mortality measures for patients hospitalized with an acute myocardial infarction.

The final ruling announces CMS’ plans to develop additional quality measures that are specifically appropriate for hospital outpatient care, and will require hospitals to report the outpatient-specific measures beginning in 2009.

Hospitals must participate in an HCAHPS Dry Run before they can participate in full HCAHPS. All hospitals not collecting data on an ongoing basis starting in October 2006 will need to participate in the March 2007 HCAHPS Dry Run—even if the hospital has already completed a Dry Run in 2006. If you are not currently participating in HCAHPS, plan now for the HCAHPS Dry Run in March 2007 so that you can participate in the full HCAHPS implementation in July 2007.

This is a late-breaking announcement with far-reaching implications for hospitals. If you have questions about how this latest CMS announcement will affect your hospital and how The Jackson Organization can help, contact our dedicated HCAHPS expert, at hcahps@jacksonorganization.com.

The Jackson Organization Announces New Partnership with Custom Learning Systems Group

The Jackson Organization is thrilled to announce our newly formed alliance with Custom Learning Systems Group. Brian Lee, founder of Custom Learning Systems, is the author of six books and is one of North America’s leading experts in the field of world-class healthcare patient satisfaction and employee retention. The Jackson Organization clients will now have access to Custom Learning Solution's trademarked Employer of Choice - Service Excellence Initiative ™ program which can help your healthcare organization to become the Employer, Provider and Hospital of Choice™ in your marketplace. To turbo charge your efforts and achieve increased patient satisfaction scores, reduce nurse/staff turnover and improve physician engagement, Custom Learning Systems provides proven training and implementation processes. These processes are totally customized and integrated with your unique needs, culture, and goals – and will now also be integrated with your ongoing patient, employee, physician and consumer research.

This alliance combines the survey research expertise of The Jackson Organization and the expanded consulting services of Custom Learning Systems Group. Together, The Jackson Organization is now positioned to be your survey research expert and a full-service consulting partner, offering the full breadth of healthcare research and consulting services.

For more details, email us at info@jacksonorganization.com.

Success Story: The Joys and Challenges of Magnet Status: Bassett Raises the Bar with Magnet

Bassett Healthcare
Cooperstown, New York

The Jackson Organization has many Magnet hospitals as clients, and recently our expert analysts compared Magnet clients to all other clients. The result? As a group, Magnet hospitals outperformed all other clients in patient satisfaction—and Bassett Healthcare was the top Magnet hospital overall.

The Jackson Organization’s 2006 Conference Creating Excellence in Healthcare

To thrive, hospitals must simultaneously strive for the strongest market position, highest productivity, the best patient satisfaction scores and a strong bottom line. The Jackson Organization’s 2006 Conference Creating Excellence in Healthcare, at the fabulous Kingsmill Resort in Williamsburg, Virginia, was a fantastic success in helping healthcare administrators achieve these challenging—yet attainable—goals. On top of the success of the conference, not only did everyone walk away with detailed roadmaps to success, everyone also had a blast!

This year’s general sessions featured speakers that inspired and educated. Jamie Clarke kicked off the conference with his stories of achieving the impossible. After he walked the crowd through the challenges, obstacles, and lessons learned on his journeys to reach the summit of Mt. Everest, achieving the impossible in healthcare didn’t seem quite so impossible any more. Susan Frampton, Ph.D., President of Planetree, sent a powerful message that healthcare organizations need to question everything. The conference was wrapped up by highly sought-after speaker and author, Greg Nelson of the Studer Group. A leading authority on employee recognition, Mr. Nelson took the enthusiastic crowd on a wild journey through the most effective ways to manage multi-generational teams in healthcare settings.

The breakout sessions provided not only great insights and best practices, but they also provided a model for how presentations should be done. Packed with humor, energy, music, video, hard numbers, and actionable recommendations, clients were quite impressed with their experiences.

The highlight of the conference was the Dinner and Awards Ceremony. This was the opportunity to recognize those that are leading the way we deliver healthcare in America. The big winner of the night was Anne Arundel Medical Center of Annapolis, MD with five awards.

Of course, the post-conference workshop can’t be left out. Led by Brian Lee, founder of Custom Learning Systems Group, the workshop highlighted how to leverage HCAHPS to become the employer and provider of choice. Even more exciting was the announcement of The Jackson Organization’s alliance with Custom Learning Systems Group. This alliance combines the survey research expertise of The Jackson Organization and the expanded consulting services of Brian Lee’s Custom Learning Systems Group. The Jackson Organization is now positioned to offer survey research and be your full-service consulting partner, offering a complete range of healthcare research and consulting services.

Were the conference attendees thrilled? Check out how our clients rated this year’s conference:

• Value/Relevance of the content to your work: 4.74 (Up from 4.41 last year)

• Coordination and organization of the conference: 4.79 (Up from 4.74 last year)

• Likelihood to recommend the conference to others: 4.74 (Up from 4.48 last year)

• Likelihood to attend the next Jackson Organization Conference: 4.60 (Up from 4.16 last year)

• Overall Satisfaction with the Conference: 4.73 (Up from 4.46 last year)

But just like we tell our clients, you never rest on the laurels of success. As great as the 2006 conference was, The Jackson Organization will make sure that 2007 will be even better.

Spreading Best Practices: Tracking Wait Times by Perception

As has been said by many regarding the opinions of patients, their perception is reality. When it comes to the patient’s perception of waits at your hospital, your opinion—even if backed up by hard data—doesn’t hold much sway. If a patient feels like they waited an hour and a half in the outpatient waiting room, then it is the same as if they actually waited an hour and a half, regardless of what the timestamps say.

Charles Flinn, CEO and Jan Bednar, Patient Care Manager of St. Clare’s Health System were among the award winners and presenters at The Jackson Organization 2006 Creating Excellence in Healthcare annual conference. When measuring the impact of changes to the outpatient services in an effort to reduce wait times, they knew that they had to improve the reality and perception of wait times. To do this, they began using the patients’ self-reported wait times as their metric to gauge success. Their efforts to improve perceptions of wait times were successful. By utilizing their Fast Track resources for outpatients in the first part of the day (when Fast Track was being underutilized), the patients’ actual wait times were reduced by 69%, and the perception of wait times improved considerably as well.

The benefits of their new outpatient process serves as a perfect model for reducing the perception of long waits by patients:

• Hospital staff comes to the patient—not the other way around. With this approach, patients won’t get lost and staff can make sure all tests are completed. Furthermore, constant human companionship goes a long way in reducing perceived wait times. Patients are taken to where they need to go.
• Improved signage. There are few situations that seem more time-consuming than being lost. When patients are lost, their satisfactions levels are unlikely to increase. To address this, St. Clare’s has begun using layman’s terms for signs and have moved away from sole reliance on color coding. Using shapes on signs allows the color-blind and illiterate to understand the signs.
• Improved Parking. You could have the best hospital in the world with the fastest outpatient turnaround in the history of medicine—but if your patients have to spend 45 minutes to find parking, they are not likely to rate your hospital as having short wait times. Patients begin forming opinions of your hospital the moment they enter the parking lot, so be sure to address any and all problems with parking. An interesting side-note to this story: St. Clare’s really did reduce the actual wait times and improved outpatient turnaround; all by itself, this improvement lead to faster turnaround for the parking lot as well. An expansion to parking had been planned, but with improved turnaround this was no longer needed.

Patients don’t mind the passage of time nearly as much as they mind the unproductive passage of time. Give them human contact. Put internet access in the waiting room. Make sure there is always reading material available, and please make sure that the “reading material” is more than just pamphlets about diseases. And certainly make sure that a patient—any patient—is never left waiting around wondering what’s going to happen next and when it’s going to happen. Knowledge can improve perception quite effectively, so inform your patients of what will happen when.

Ask the Experts

“How do you establish accountability for recognition programs? Should we set quotas for managers?”

Recognition is the key to success for any organization. If you recognize your employees consistently, you’ll experience reduced turnover and increased employee and patient satisfaction. Recognition programs must address accountability if they are to work at all.

This question was given to Brian Lee, founder of Custom Learning Systems Group, during his post-conference workshop for The Jackson Organization’s annual conference. He strongly advised against setting quotas, as this would lead to insincere recognition. Establishing a team for recognition with a clear mandate is the first step in establishing accountability. The Jackson Organization has its own committee dedicated to our “Check Them Out” recognition program. The most important step, however, is to measure recognition down to the unit-specific level—and hold those managers and supervisors accountable for their department’s scores on recognition. By holding individual managers accountable for recognizing employees (even tying it to bonuses), you will find that managers will see to it that employees are consistently recognized, through enlightened self-interest if nothing else.

Step 1: Establish a Recognition Team/Committee. Give the team a clear mandate and the resources to educate all employees about the recognition program. The team should establish clear criteria for recognizing employees and the accompanying rewards.

Step 2: Measure Satisfaction and Engagement at the Unit/Department-Specific Level. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. For recognition programs to work, you’ve got to do more than measure across the entire organization as a whole. In most organizations, there will be managers who are adept at reward and recognition and those who are not. By measuring at the unit-department level, you can easily identify areas where recognition is succeeding (these are the managers to model) and areas where it is not.

Step 3: Hold Managers/Supervisors Accountable for Recognition. With unit/department-specific reporting, you can tie bonuses and performance reviews to their performance on individual questions. Hold your managers/supervisors accountable for their scores on recognition questions.

The Jackson Organization is packed with experts in a wide variety of fields. In addition to our vast healthcare expertise, we employ experts in statistics, employee retention, focus group moderation, marketing and more. “Ask the Experts” is your direct line to all of our experts. To ask our team of experts a question, just send an email to asktheexperts@jacksonorganization.com, and we’ll provide a thoroughly researched answer for you. If you wish to remain anonymous, rest assured your confidentiality will be totally protected.

Around the Office: Halloween is supposed to be scary? We made it FUN!

One of The Jackson Organization’s values is having a workplace characterized by trust, friendship and teamwork. One of the amazing things about building a culture around values like this is that you don’t have to plan fun. In a culture like ours, fun happens. Especially on Halloween, when being the craziest, wackiest, and strangest employee has tangible benefits.

Celebrations—whether for holidays or recognizing major accomplishments—are essential for the well-being of an organization. When employees have fun, the increased bonding and engagement becomes almost palpable. To start the day off right, everyone received a pumpkin container with a treat and a skeleton to hang in their work area. We had enough sugar around to send a stadium full of low-carb dieters into hyperglycemic shock. We had a successful pumpkin-carving contest with several entries, and then there was the costume contest.

Dave Jackson, President & CEO, took everyone wearing a costume, marched them around the outside of the headquarters and gathered everyone for a group photo and final judging. Just another example of leading from the front lines—Dave has an uncanny sense for knowing when fun is happening, and we can always count on him to jump into the fray. That’s what great leaders do.

At The Jackson Organization we are very dedicated to our clients and helping them to improve healthcare. When there is a gift certificate for the best costume, well . . . we’re quite dedicated to winning those, too.