Understanding the Patient Experience

By: Matt Knoedel, MHA '17

Paige Moore (MHA '10, right) and Carol Ayangbile (MHA '13, second from right) offer feedback to first-year MHA students on a case study in patient experience.

Imagine having your elderly mother fall ill and need to be hospitalized. You are terrified, you don’t know what is wrong with your mother and no one is able to tell you. Over the next couple days, she is shuttled between the hospital and her nursing home. As her condition becomes worse, she becomes hospitalized again. She is hooked up to some strange machines and becomes violently ill with an infectious disease. As she becomes more and more sick, the staff tell you they want to put her in hospice care. You don’t fully understand what this means and when you meet with the hospice nurse, she rudely asks “What do you need to know?” in an uncompassionate tone. You decide to use another hospice service nurse who explains more about hospice, but you are still worried. Your mother’s doctor indicates that she is stable enough to return to her nursing home. On the way, your mother passes away. You are informed over the phone from her hospice nurse who says she never should have been transported in her condition.

            This is based off a real-life scenario. This really happened to someone. There were so many opportunities in which the hospital staff could have been more caring and compassionate, but they weren’t.

When we use the term “Patient Experience” this is what we are talking about. At one point or another, we will all be a patient or have a relative who is a patient. This topic is so important – we need to imagine that each patient is someone else’s mother, father, sibling or cousin.  

In our weekly Professional Development Seminar meeting on April 28, two MHA alumnus (Paige Moore, Patient Experience at UnityPoint Health-Des Moines and Carol Ayangbile, Patient Experience Director at Unity Point-Quad Cities) came to talk with 1^st and 2^nd year MHA students about the patient experience.

We learned about some of the foundational principles of patient experience in use at UnityPoint Health, including AIDET, a no point policy, and managing up. AIDET is a customer excellence strategy and stands for Acknowledge, Introduce, Duration, Explanation, and Thank you. Strategies like AIDET help to make the hospital experience a little less frightening for patients.

Both Paige and Carol shared some of the programs in place to improve patient experience in their respective locations. For instance, in the Quad Cities, a patient experience specialist provides updates at huddles to reinforce patient experience strategies. At the Des Moines location, employees practice narrating care and hourly rounding to make sure the patient is informed and knows what care they are getting and why.

After discussing these strategies, we broke into groups to discuss a case study, which was the scenario described above. We identified opportunities for improvement in patient experience and ways we could have provided real-time service recovery. After the case study, we were able to ask Paige and Carol questions about patient experience, their current roles, and their path after graduating the program. Their perspectives and backgrounds in patient experience were enlightening and invaluable for our class.