Compassion is Secret to Achieving High Patient Satisfaction

July 26, 2006

Staff working in the finance department often have a lot of patient contact and are major contributors to the patient satisfaction rate. According to Fred Lee, author of If Disney Ran Your Hospital: 9 ½ Things You Would Do Differently, managers should focus on the skills that help staff achieve excellence in creating the key impressions that matter most to patients. Measuring patient satisfaction often requires judgments of personal behavior, which commonly goes unreported to managers.

Lee presented two special breakout sessions as well as a jam-packed general luncheon session at HFMA's 2006 Annual National Institute and suggested that managers should:

• Encourage staff to make courtesy more important than efficiency
• Use measurements to improve, not to impress
• Decentralize the authority to say "yes" by giving staff who deal with patients the ability to make immediate decisions that solve problems and give good customer service
• Discontinue using competitive rewards to motivate staff and shift staff focus back to the patient

The Road to Compassion

The road to creating an environment of compassion toward patients begins with the manager. Managers must demonstrate compassion by letting their staff know that they care about the staff's well-being, as well as the patient's. Using the three levels of caring -- competence, courtesy and compassion -- as a guide, managers can achieve new levels of success for cultivating and sustaining their teams and the hospital's patients.

The first level of care is competence. The second level of care is courtesy. Finally, there is the third level of caring, compassion. Compassion goes beyond common courtesy; it means service to the patient that demonstrates genuine concern. Authentic compassion and caring about each patient on a personal level is the most evident form of personal behavior and translates into patient loyalty.

According to Lee, this display of compassion is what makes all the difference in patients perceiving truly excellent service and hospitals achieving a high patient satisfaction rate.

SOURCE: If Disney Ran Your Hospital: 9½ Things You Would Do Differently , presented by Fred Lee June 21, 2006, at HFMA's 2006 Annual National Institute.

Additional Resources

• Reports and tools on enhancing the patient experience are available on the PATIENT FRIENDLY BILLING ® web site.

HFMA Wants You to Know ISSN: 1540-0697. Volume V, Issue 16. Copyright 2006, Healthcare Financial Management Association. All rights reserved.