What do luxury hotels and hospitals have in common? Before Sven Gierlinger came around, not much. As a former leader in The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Gierlinger made the transition to healthcare with one mission in mind: to improve the patient experience. Now, as the chief experience officer at Northwell Health—a position created for him by Northwell CEO Michael Dowling and the innovative thinkers at Northwell—Gierlinger is accomplishing his mission one mood-lit room, night of restful sleep, and delicious meal at a time.
“I have the best job in healthcare,” Gierlinger says, smiling. “I get to work with every facet of Northwell’s integrated health system and make sure we are focused on the best possible experience for the patient.”
Improving patient experience is not a marketing gimmick. Gierlinger notes that extensive research shows that patient experience and the quality of health outcomes are interconnected. This idea—that Northwell could do a better job for the New York population it serves by making improvements in the patient’s overall experience—is a driving factor behind a number of innovations Northwell has implemented in its hospitals and clinics, including one that’s extremely revolutionary, the Let Sleeping Patients Lie program.
Developed at Northwell’s Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research by a team led by Drs. Theodoros Zanos and Jamie Hirsch, the Let Sleeping Patients Lie program is predicated on research that indicates that vital sign monitoring disruptions for hospitalized patients during overnight hours have been linked to cognitive impairment, hypertension, increased stress, and even mortality. For the first time, a team at the Feinstein Institute has developed a deep-learning predictive clinical tool to identify which patients do not need to be woken up overnight—allowing them to rest, recover, and be discharged faster.
IMPROVING IN PATIENT EXPERIENCE
Innovations in Patient Experience Leading Northwell to Higher Patient Satisfaction
“Our business intelligence team’s efforts are contributing to creating a healing environment at Northwell hospitals and allowing patients to sleep through the night is one part of that” says Gierlinger.
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Essentially, the algorithm created by Drs. Zanos and Hirsch analyzes a number of patient metrics—respiratory rate, heart rate, systolic blood pressure, body temperature, and patient age—and, based on 24.3 million vital sign measurements collected between 2012 and 2019, tells healthcare workers which patients can peacefully snooze through the night. The program earned Drs. Zanos and Hirsch and their team at Feinstein a 2021 Fast Company World Changing Ideas Award. But, more importantly for Gierlinger’s line of work, Let Sleeping Patients Lie has enabled a previously unprecedented number of patients to get a good night’s sleep, boosting overall patient experience satisfaction.
“Our business intelligence team’s efforts are contributing to creating a healing environment at Northwell hospitals and allowing patients to sleep through the night is one part of that,” says Gierlinger.
Other innovations to the overnight experience have included dim lighting, soft sounds, low-playing pleasant music, staff using quieter voices at night, and raised visitor awareness of patients’ rest needs. This “healing environment” is a direct result of the hospitality mindset Gierlinger brought over from Ritz Carlton, which has an “enliven the senses and instill well-being” motto that he says translates directly to healthcare.
“When people are sick is when they need this environment the most,” says Gierlinger. “Genuine care and comfort mean anticipating patients’ needs, providing a positive first impression, little things like making sure the hospital smells good. These things humanize our patients and contribute to their wellbeing and recovery.”
While innovation is often born of rigorous research in the lab, sometimes innovation comes from another source: the patients themselves.
“Genuine care and comfort mean anticipating patients’ needs, providing a positive first impression, little things like making sure the hospital smells good.”
“Michael Dowling is famous for saying what patients tell us to work on is like free consulting,” laughs Gierlinger. “Listening to the voice of customers is nothing new in hospitality, but it was less common in healthcare.”
Traditionally, the healthcare system has felt more patriarchal, with a top-down model where the clinician knew best and disseminated prescriptions for patients to follow. Northwell takes a more cooperative approach that views a patient’s health as a partnership between person and provider. In such a partnership, both sides have a responsibility to improve.
On the healthcare side, Northwell uses a myriad of methods to listen and learn from patients to see where improvement is needed. Last year alone, Northwell received back 500,000 responses to formal surveys and, by correlating the data, was able to glean 700,000 “insights” relating to the patient experience. Of those, 80% were positive, signaling to Gierlinger that Northwell was on the right track, but also showing areas of opportunity.
One major innovation that came from patient responses is an improvement in the food at Northwell hospitals. Patients complaining about hospital food is, of course, not uncommon. Gierlinger thinks hospitals were not incentivized to improve the food because market research suggested that food quality did not drive brand loyalty, a concept Gierlinger and Northwell rejected. Their own data analysis suggested otherwise.
“Turns out, patients care about the food!” exclaims Gierlinger. “If you have patients telling you they were satisfied with the care, but horrified by the food, why wouldn’t you do the easy thing and improve the food?”
This sparked a total food transformation at Northwell. By hiring Michelin star acclaimed chef Bruno Tison, Northwell Health became the first healthcare system to ever bring in a chef of that caliber to overhaul its food program. Tison, in turn, hired chefs he knew and respected from the hotel and fine dining world to populate all Northwell facilities. Now, Northwell hospitals in average are above the 80th percentile for quality of food nationally, with many as high as the 90th percentile.
“Recently I read a comment that said our food was so good that it helped the patient forget about the pain they were in,” recalls Gierlinger. “Improving the food has had a major impact on our level of care.”
Gierlinger’s hospitality mindset is shared throughout Northwell through its Relationship Centered Communication Course. The RCC is a course that teaches providers to focus on building trust with patients by treating them with empathy. It also instructs providers on ways to integrate this mindset into how they practice medicine. Making a personal connection from the first impression all the way to treatment and discharge causes drastically improves the quality of in-patient care.
“Recently I read a comment that said our food was so good that it helped the patient forget about the pain they were in,” recalls Gierlinger. “Improving the food has had a major impact on our level of care.”
“We’ve had tremendous success with RCC,” says Gierlinger, noting that over 2,500 providers have already taken the day-long intensive course. “What we’re hearing is that the course helps providers reconnect to the reasons why they got into medicine in the first place.”
As a result of this focus, Northwell Health now ranks close to the 90th percentile in Likelihood to Recommend the Provider patient satisfaction scores, in arguably one of the toughest healthcare markets in the country.
“Healthcare comes down to trust,” says Gierlinger. “How patients are treated and the quality of their health outcomes are connected. If you have a trusting relationship between patient and provider, it improves their overall perception of the care and their overall health outcome.”
To learn more about Northwell’s innovative approach to healthcare, visit northwell.edu.
What do luxury hotels and hospitals have in common? Before Sven Gierlinger came around, not much. As a former leader in the Ritz Carlton Hotel Company, Gierlinger made the transition to healthcare with one mission in mind: to improve the patient experience. Now, as the chief experience officer at Northwell Health—a position created for him by Northwell CEO Michael Dowling and the innovative thinkers at Northwell—Gierlinger is accomplishing his mission one mood-lit room, night of restful sleep, and delicious meal at a time.
“I have the best job in healthcare,” Gierlinger says, smiling. “I get to work with every facet of Northwell’s integrated health system and make sure we are focused on the best possible experience for the patient.”
Improving patient experience is not a marketing gimmick. Gierlinger notes that extensive research shows that patient experience and the quality of health outcomes are interconnected. This idea—that Northwell could do a better job for the New York population it serves by making improvements in the patient’s overall experience—is a driving factor behind a number of innovations Northwell has implemented in its hospitals and clinics, including one that’s extremely revolutionary, the Let Sleeping Patients Lie program.
Developed at Northwell’s Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research by a team led by Drs. Theodoros Zanos and Jamie Hirsch, the Let Sleeping Patients Lie program is predicated on research that indicates that vital sign monitoring disruptions for hospitalized patients during overnight hours have been linked to cognitive impairment, hypertension, increased stress, and even mortality. For the first time, a team at the Feinstein Institutes has developed a deep-learning predictive clinical tool to identify which patients do not need to be woken up overnight—allowing them to rest, recover, and be discharged faster.
Michelin star-winning Chef Bruno Tison
Innovations in Patient Experience Leading Northwell to Higher Patient Satisfaction
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