Best Practices in Workflow for Provider and Patient Engagement
Cleveland Clinic Improves Patient Experience

Toby Cosgrove, former MD-CEO and President of the Cleveland Clinic experienced a revelation after speaking at a business class at Harvard University. One student shared her decision not to use the Cleveland Clinic for her father’s open-heart surgery. She did not feel the doctors were empathetic enough when dealing with patients. This story completely changed Dr. Cosgrove’s focus for the hospital. He began to transform the organizational culture by training all 43,000 Cleveland Clinic staff on empathy and in 2006, the Clinic hired a Chief Experience Officer. Physicians began to improve the ways they interact with their patients, encouraged patients to be engaged during their stay, and asked them to leave comments regarding the care received. Cleveland Clinic has ranked first place in a national measure of patient satisfaction amid other hospitals. The changes they implemented have been positive, effective, and worth emulating.

• Empathy. Empathy builds trust and communication with patients. Cleveland Clinic provides empathy training for all employees, which provides value to patients and caregivers throughout their care journey.
• Shared Medical Appointments (SMAs) offer an innovative and interactive avenue to healthcare that brings patients with common needs together with one or multiple healthcare providers, depending on the level of care needed. SMAs allow for patients in the same situation to build connections and feel a sense of support from one another.
• Distance Health is an initiative that was developed to remove the geographic barriers to care and allow for better patient experience. It includes remote outpatient/inpatient, ICU, and acute virtual visits, remote chronic health monitoring, remote imaging upload, and online second opinions through MyConsult. Distance Health visits have significantly increased over the years averaging up to 3,652 visits per month in 2018.
• Transparency. Cleveland Clinic improved transparency between physicians and patients by allowing patients to rate their providers and post positive or negative comments regarding their experience. Artificial intelligence is used to read and group comments, based on their theme, ultimately holding providers accountable for their patients’ experience.
• Same-day appointments are offered depending on the level of care a patient needs and if the call was placed before noon. Same-day appointments dramatically decreases patients’ waiting times for appointments, providing the care they need, right away, and driving up patient satisfaction.

This best practice was discussed as part of eHealth Initiative’s June 2018 Workflow for Provider and Patient Engagement Workgroup.