Letter from the Chief Medical Officer

Dear Colleagues:

For nearly a decade, we have worked with Press Ganey to measure inpatient satisfaction, and in recent years, we began surveying Faulkner Hospital inpatients, and, most recently, BW/F ambulatory patients. I’m proud to report that our satisfaction rates have never been better.

For Brigham inpatients, we have received all-time high scores for a more than a year, with each quarter topping the last. Our overall score for inpatient satisfaction last year placed us on the 94th percentile of like-size teaching hospitals that use Press Ganey—a goal we had set previously. And, we’ve managed to improve on that in recent months, as we have now reached the 98th percentile.

Satisfaction scores for inpatients at Faulkner now mirror scores from BWH. On the most recent quarterly report, the survey mean scores and scores for physicians, nurses and overall assessment are nearly identical at both BWH and FH.

In BW/F Ambulatory Services, we started collecting patient satisfaction data two years ago, and after a year’s worth of data gave us a baseline, we set a goal to reach the 75th percentile. That gave all the staff in our ambulatory practices something to work towards, and with dozens of improvement projects in place, we reached that goal, surpassed it actually, in one year.

Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of setting and then reaching a goal is setting our next goal even higher. On the inpatient side at BWH, we have room to improve our support services, and as physicians, we can help lead improvements in discharging our patients by working with our care teams and setting goals for discharge a day in advance. And we can communicate better with one another and the rest of the care team at hand-offs.

Press Ganey data, when analyzed with additional metrics collected with the Balanced Scorecard, goes well beyond patients being satisfied with their meals. We have department, division and physician level data for performance, all of which is valuable in fueling individual improvement. Ultimately, this data helps us with ongoing professional practice evaluations and pay-for-performance metrics.

Thank you for your continued hard work and dedication. The congratulations on having reached and surpassed our goals are well deserved but short lived. We now have new, loftier goals in sight.