Hospital administrations across the nation claim their cultures are built around providing an excellent patient experience, but they’ve got nothing on Arcadia, Calif.-based Methodist Hospital. Rather than using excellence as a foundation, the administration of this acute care hospital placed the bar of its strategic plan at exceptional and beyond.

Although the administration takes pride in the years spent adhering to the hospital’s strategic plan through quarterly reviews, progress checks, and goal reevaluation, to take it to the next level, the plan needed to inspire the board, medical staff, employees, and community at large.

“For our patients to have an exceptional experience, our caregivers need to have an exceptional experience connecting with the organization,” said Dennis Lee, CEO. “By strengthening the relationship we have with the hospital’s stakeholders, we felt we would drive the creation of an exceptional experience at all levels, 100% of the time.”

Exceptional employee experience
Established in 1903, Methodist Hospital is known for its innovative approach to healthcare. From the “thoroughly modern” facility opened in 1915 (the first of its kind Los Angeles with reinforced concrete) to the 22-acre campus opened in 1957 as the first community hospital built in California with a psychiatric unit, Methodist has always provided what it considers the next generation of care.

It should then be no surprise that three years ago, Lee and his team developed the Next Generation Care initiative to look at ways to improve the patient experience. The first year dealt with conflict resolution and the second with patient complaints. This year, the initiative is focused on rolling out and putting into action a strategic plan by enhancing the culture of the hospital.

“We recently hired a retention specialist whose sole job is to strategize how to retain our employees by making them feel this is the best place to work,” said Lee. “We start with orientation.”

Lee spends the first 30 minutes of new-employee orientation discussing leadership principles and what employees can expect from the administration and staff, including open communication, honesty, and the fact that every employee is treated with dignity and respect. New employees have a one-month follow up with their manager to find out how the job is progressing and if there are any deficiencies.

“We want them to feel supported and comfortable from day one,” Lee said. “They have another follow up in three months and another in six. We’ve found our turnover mostly happens within the first two years of an employees’ experience, and this part of the initiative is aimed at reducing those figures.”

In January and February, the hospital will gather its medical executive committee members for three half-day physician leadership training sessions with an outside consulting firm. Each committee member is asked to bring one young physician s/he feels could be groomed as a physician leader in the future. “By investing in physician leadership training, we want to get our physicians more closely aligned with the executive team while providing them the tools to enhance the jobs they’ve already been doing.”

In addition, the hospital’s educational department developed the School at Work (SAW) program, providing entry-level employees the opportunity to further their education as well as access to better paying jobs. This August, the hospital graduated nine of its employees from the program.

“We feel we can accommodate a better-trained and better-educated employee group within our hospital,” said Lee. “It’s a win-win situation from all angles and further enhances our goal of providing an exceptional experience for all who walk through our hospital’s doors.”

Step-by-step inclusion
In the past few years, a number of hospitals in Los Angeles County have had to constrain their emergency capacity or close their doors altogether, leaving their patients to turn to hospitals such as Methodist. Although Methodist’s administration developed a facility expansion plan with a new patient care tower and parking structure and invested in electronic bed boards to handle the increased patient volumes, it wasn’t enough.

“We’ve seen the most growth in our emergency activity in the past few years, but since roughly 28% of our emergency visits end up in admission, it’s also put some pressure on our inpatient capacity,” said Lee.

As a result, the hospital recently reopened a nursing unit that hadn’t been in use since the mid-’90s. Located in an older wing of the hospital, the 30-bed inpatient unit received a cosmetic makeover, including carpeting, painting, and new beds and furniture for the rooms, before opening. And while some of the pressure was alleviated, it was clear other efficiencies were required.

On November 1, Methodist went live with the first phase of a clinical documentation system with an electronic nursing assessment. The Eclipsys Sunrise Clinical Manager, once fully automated, will provide a hospital-wide, fully integrated EMR. According to Lee, the decision to start with the nursing department was multi-faceted.

Because the nursing staff is a regularly scheduled population, proper training was possible, and the project could be piloted and rolled out one unit at a time. As in most hospitals, nurses spend an inordinate amount of time documenting the care they give to patients. The system promises to make that documentation process much more efficient. To make sure all goals were accomplished with the highest level of quality, the executive team included its staff nurses in every step of the process.

“It’s fairly obvious that if you don’t involve your staff nurses from the very beginning, you’ll probably run into some problems with implementation,” Lee said. “We made sure all of our nurses were properly trained, and we documented their training before we went live. We want this system to improve our efficiencies as much as we want it to improve the satisfaction our nurses have in doing their jobs. ”