Lakeview Private Hospital (Lakeview) came to Cemplicity with a desire to closely monitor patient feedback and reliably benchmark it against local and national results to ensure best-in-class outcomes.
We sat down with Sally Holmes, Lakeview’s Quality Manager and Infection Control Coordinator, and Elle Zattera, Lakeview’s Executive Services Manager. We hear how targets have been met and exceeded, and the additional benefits, like staff morale and competition, they have discovered along the way.
Lakeview Private Hospital
Lakeview is a completely doctor owned private hospital located in Sydney, Australia. They are heading into their 9th year of operations with their 78-bed facility providing a full range of elective surgeries with inpatient and day-stay rehabilitation programmes.
As a fairly young hospital, with less than 10 years of operating behind them, Lakeview’s team were already relatively confident that they were doing a good job. However, they didn’t have quality centralised data to prove it, so they couldn’t measure themselves against others and didn’t know what improvement opportunities they could be missing out on.
While they were collecting patient feedback, their patient feedback mechanism was relatively crude, taking the form of a paper that was physically given to patients by staff. The Lakeview team recognised this wasn’t the best solution. Paper is easily put down and not picked back up again by the patient, meaning enormous potential to miss out on feedback from individual patients.
The paper-based feedback that was submitted was time-consuming for staff to process and interpret. Unsurprisingly, engagement for both the patient and the staff was low, and
issues that could have been identified through feedback were slow to bubble up.
The move to digital
The simple step of digitisation has changed that. Cemplicity’s digital patient feedback platform has immediately brought efficiencies for staff, giving them a quick and easy
way of identifying pertinent feedback and act on it. More importantly, it has improved the quality of data captured, and boosted response rates by giving patients the opportunity to respond when, where and how most suits them.
“Staff were quite happy they didn’t have to hand out forms... it’s been less work for them.” - Sally Holmes
The NPS game-changer
But while improved patient responses and more efficient capture of them have been valuable for Lakeview, the real impact has been in introducing the Net Promoter Score
(NPS) component into the patient feedback. This simple, consolidated metric has given Lakeview a robust quantifiable measure to benchmark, track and report on, opening up a
range of new applications for data-driven service improvement. Where before PREMs was seen as a task that consumes employee time without leading to actionable change, with the implementation of NPS it has transformed into a hugely valuable tool for extracting benchmarks, identifying trends and reacting quickly to address any issues.
“We didn’t have an NPS. So we had a very rudimentary way of doing patient feedback - we had a tri-fold brochure that went out that was collated by the ward clerks and presented at our quality meeting. But there was no NPS. There was no way to centralise and track all of that. So it’s been a huge improvement.
Cemplicity has been, at least from the executive team’s perspective, one of our best investments recently.” - Elle Zattera
Competitive benchmarking
For any sort of organisation to measure its success, they must be able to compare themselves to others doing the same work. Implementing NPS has allowed Lakeview to collate their feedback in a format that is easily comparable to other national and local
hospitals.
“Net promoter score is recognised amongst the industry as being very important.” - Sally
Lakeview can now ensure that their goals and standards of care are being met in a reliable and robust way that is easy to report back to staff, the community and the board. This ability to see clear metrics against a variety of variables opens up a wide range of opportunities to understand where improvements can be made for patients during one of the most stressful times in their lives.
“Prior to having a net promoter score, we had clinical indicator data which benchmarks clinical outcomes nationally within our peer group. However, we didn’t have data to compare with our local competitors. Most of them have it on their website, so now we jump in and check to make sure we’re above them.” - Elle
Internal benchmarking
But it’s not only about external comparison. Cemplicity’s reporting platform has allowed Lakeview to create benchmarks within their own hospital, comparing against other time frames and even comparing departmental performance. While not the primary motivation for Lakeview, this has had a hugely positive influence on staff morale. Performance across departments is directly discussed in meetings, used for board reporting, shared in doctor’s
rooms and sent out in a whole hospital report. This has led to staff developing a friendly competitive culture towards other departments which heightens their engagement and attitude to their work. They also have visibility over their performance compared with other local hospitals providing further impetus to improve.
“We tell staff the good with the bad. But most of it is outstanding, and it’s something we’re really proud of, there’s a little bit of competitiveness between some departments. Healthy competition! It goes on the staff notice boards in each department every week. It’s also discussed at their department meetings.” - Sally
Happy, engaged staff who are proud of their work can only mean good things for the patients under their care.
Higher quality data
The freedom to fill in feedback in the patient’s own time, with free text prompts and a digital format, has led to an uptake in response rates. This provides better-quality data, but it has also led to more comprehensive comments.
“We do get some surprises, funny little things that might’ve happened in the patient lounges - comments about the hot water zipper not working. Nobody told us about that, but it came back through a survey.” - Sally
Patients also feel more comfortable making small complaints that they might not want to bother staff with in person and personal complaints they might feel awkward about when
handing in a paper feedback form.
“It’s usually about things like a nurse’s personality or a perceived lack of care, interest, empathy, that sort of thing. And through that we have identified a trend with one or two nurses that have needed some performance management and more training on customer service.” - Sally
The higher-quality, more extractable data has been beneficial for strategic planning and forming business cases for patient pain points like extra parking. The extra layers of defendable data proving patient outcomes beyond nationally required clinical indicators also aid funding applications.
“We are negotiating with the health funds for our rebates, because a measure of patient satisfaction is a criteria.” - Sally
“I’ve been able to use it in health department applications, but we wanted to expand the service to say this is what patients think of the current service to back the business case to expand, which has been really useful and I’m about to use it again this week.” - Elle
Real-time feedback
One of the superpowers of Cemplicity’s digital feedback is real-time reporting, and Lakeview has seen this deliver great value. Staff can be quick and reactive when issues arise, which has twofold rewards. Patients can see the results and feel heard, and feedback to staff is continually relevant rather than from months ago, which encourages participation in the process.
“We see the responses very quickly and it’s allowing us to react and deal with any deficits straight away.” - Sally
Conclusion
Cemplicity has helped Lakeview revolutionise patient feedback from what was once a time sucking process into a truly transformative tool. From top-level strategic applications to making sure everyone can get a hot cup of tea - now the feedback is higher volume, high quality and quickly actionable. This is making a real-world impact not only on patient care but on the everyday commitment of staff. This is a win-win situation all round.
