University Hospitals Case Medical Center
Cleveland, OH
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"I'm a huge believer in Skylight because it is proven to work. We have utilized the Skylight program to help us measure results and to get our staff fully engaged with patients. It's amazing the results we have had. Launching this initiative without Skylight wouldn't have delivered the same outcomes." |
Cleanliness
Hospital Description
University Hospitals operates 150 locations throughout northeast Ohio, encompassing a network of hospitals, outpatient centers and primary care physicians.
University Hospitals Case Medical Center is home to clinical and research centers. Services include oncology, pediatrics, women's health, orthopedics, radiology, radiation oncology, neurosurgery, neuroscience, cardiology, cardiovascular surgery, organ transplantation, and human genetics.
Situation
The team at University Hospitals Case Medical Center, a seven unit, 1,032 bed adult and pediatric facility, was dealing with a poor perception of environmental services.
Knowing that room cleanliness is essential to patient satisfaction and anxious to make measurable improvements, the EVS team launched the process of addressing the issue.
Strategy
The team first identified its needs.
- Knowing what patients and their families thought about room cleanliness in real time
- Evaluating staff friendliness
- Creating metrics based on patient perceptions
- Developing a service culture to grow staff support for change
- Putting systems in place to solidify staff understanding of their impact on HCAHPS scores
The desired solution was a process to gather real-time perceptions from both patients and their families that would allow execution of immediate service recovery. In instances where service recovery was provided, the courtesy of the staff needed to be gauged.
To gather these essential real-time perceptions, the team knew it needed interactive patient care technology that was easy to implement and simple for the patient to use.
Approach
With consultative services provided by members of the Skylight team, who shared data to support how messaging could most effectively be delivered to achieve the desired goals, UH launched the program after providing personalized training for more than 100 people on its environmental services staff.
Implementation, which was aligned with the SODEXO Engage initiative, took place in four UH units:
- Rainbow Babies and Children's
- Lerner Tower
- MacDonald Women's
- Lakeside
Skylight delivered special surveys to patients designed to provide real time feedback on perceived room cleanliness, along with the courtesy and responsiveness of the environmental staff. When completed surveys indicated a need for service, or when a patient triggered a service alert, notification appeared immediately on a staff member's pager.
Results
The number of completed room cleanliness surveys increased from 150 prior to the implementation to 3,781 following implementation.
Response times to service alerts were consistently met within a ten minute window, which generated a significant 20% improvement in HCAHPS/Press Ganey Room Cleanliness scores over ten months.
The average percentile of the four University Hospital units increased from 10 to 44%. The Lakeside Unit improved from the 7th to the 50th percentile.
Beyond the HCAHPS scores there were significant additional benefits at University Hospitals Case Medical Center:
- Improved nurse satisfaction
- Enhanced work environment for environmental services staff members
- Greater accountability and empowerment
