Brigham and Women's Hospital
"Moving the Needle" Takes People, Processes and Leadership
Brigham and Women's Hospital is a 777-bed nonprofit, teaching hospital located in Boston, Massachusetts. Scores on the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey show that it is a leading hospital nationally on measures of patient satisfaction. Since 2002, the hospital has followed three strategies to improve patient satisfaction: allocating significant new funding for quality measurement and process improvement work, including establishing a Center for Clinical Excellence; developing a management information system for hospital leaders that tracks patient and family experiences, along with other hospital performance indicators; and seeking to enhance patients' experiences by working with frontline staff, including implementing new recruitment, training, management, and improvement strategies.
Performance Improvement Strategies
- Center for Clinical Excellence, with 30 full-time employees to conduct analysis and planning as well as provide support to performance improvement and patient safety improvement work
- Communication Training, through which nurses and other frontline staff learn how to interact with patients and their families and show respect, including using appropriate language and eye contact and inquiring about their needs
- Physicians pay more attention to survey reports after hospital demonstrated that patient dissatisfaction as measured on Press Ganey surveys tracks consistently with complaints lodged directly to the hospital as well as with malpractice claims against individual physicians
