19 MAY - 2023Raising the bar of Accountability for Healthcare Leaders with Technology-driven Purposeful Leader RoundingBy Elizabeth L. Holder, Ed.D., System Director, Patient Experience, SSM HealthSSM Health is a Catholic, not-for-profit organization with 40,000 team members, more than 11,600 providers, and a geographic footprint across the Midwest. Our organization's goal is to carry out our mission every day with every patient: Through our exceptional healthcare services, we reveal the healing presence of God. One of those ways we can deliver on the mission is through demonstrating our compassion and care for our patients, using purposeful leader rounding.Purposeful rounding is a well-known technique that helps many healthcare organizations understand the patient's perspective regarding the care they receive. The benefit of rounding helps health systems, providers and nurses improve the quality of care, improve communication, decrease readmission rates and build a safety net of trust for every patient.Rounding on patients isn't a new strategy for our organization, but the way we document and monitor our rounding process has changed. In the past, we utilized Pareto charts and other non-electronic tracking tools systemwide to document conversations with patients. These outmoded techniques aren't as useful these days as we try to measure and ensure that patient concerns are being addressed in a timely fashion. In the Fall of 2022, we set out to pilot an electronic rounding tool to help us proactively understand and address patient needs in the Inpatient setting. Our goal was to develop a tool that would do all the things previously mentioned regarding purposeful rounding, in addition to ensuring patients were rounded on by a nurse leader during their stay. The preliminary outcomes from the pilot weren't surprising. The results revealed that patients who perceived that they were rounded on by a leader during their stay in the hospital were more likely to give us a higher patient experience rating. Because this was a pilot program, my team and I would meet weekly to discuss leaders' feedback. My role as a facilitator on the calls was to not only understand and review the data to determine if rounding influenced patient perceptions; I also wanted to gather leaders' feedback on the tool itself. The Patient Experience Advisors on my team would pose the following questions to their leaders: Is the tool user-friendly? Do the questions get to the heart of what matters the most to patients? The nurse leaders unanimously believe that the tool has proven user-friendly; it uncovers patients' needs as well as gives them insight into their teams' proactive response to patients' requests. While these responses weren't surprising, the nurse leaders shared additional benefits to the rounding technology that we didn't expect, highlighting that it provided more visibility, accountability, and active leader involvement in their Inpatient units. Increased visibilityNurse leaders shared that rounds documented on paper didn't allow them to instantly see the number of rounds CXO INSIGHTSElizabeth L. Holder
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