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How to Build a Patient Centric Culture

  • By Faber Infinite
  • August 24, 2016

Building a strong corporate culture is a vital component for most businesses. An optimistic environment filled with positivity, support, and innovation typically leads to better job satisfaction, which in turn often translates into greater profits, happier clients, and improved overall workplace rankings.

Similarly, in the healthcare sector where patient’s health and lives are the centre theme of the system, the benefits of a positive and clear workplace culture cannot be understated. Healthcare is an industry where employee satisfaction is closely linked to patient satisfaction.

Healthcare sector should adapt a corporate culture that places emphasis on teamwork in order to best serve patients—and ultimately save lives. The primary step is to cultivate a vision mindset in the employees for an amicable environment. It’s important to define the mission and values, but the crucial step is finding people committed to those principles. Getting started is rarely complicated, however—usually needed is a shared vision, strong communication, and committed leadership.

Another important aspect is maintaining motivation in healthcare. It is not just about money, it’s about recognition and making sure that people feel valued. We need to do more building an engaged culture where people are coming to work for a purpose and not just for a paycheck.

Recommendations for successfully embedding patient agenda into organizational culture:

– Shaping a new culture by defining the purpose and expected behaviors within an organization, and setting up reinforcing systems that are patient centric
– Hiring and training people with shared values by orienting employees how to find win-win situations for patients and the healthcare organization, rewarding and incentivizing based on improved patient outcomes, training in ethical engagement through partnerships, attuning employees to the challenges of patients, and fostering diversity
– Patient-Centred Leadership that is transformative, purpose-driven, empathic, and based on a foundation of trust, with leader selection being around competencies and attributes.
– Measuring Patient-Centred Focus based on retention; relationships; referrals; returning customers, KPIs (external and internal impact factors), and cultural measurements such as patient/ employee satisfaction and leadership outcomes.
– Decline Prevention through strategies such as cross-functional teams to prevent silos, removing de-motivating factors, and maintaining momentum of change, among other recommendations.

Real change towards patient centricity is only possible with a top-down approach that drives the new patient agenda and allocates the necessary resources and talents to drive patient centric performance within the organization.

Most of the time, change management focuses on how to build a positive culture. But there are certain blockers who are hesitant to change. The Healthcare industry should be focusing on those people who are eager to embrace change and are considered as early adopters. They are open to newer avenues and never fear the consequences of change.

What is important is understanding patients’ experiences of their condition – what the individual patient values and needs, as well as what is most likely to result in positive healthcare outcomes.

Written by: Faber Aakash Borse

Faber Aakash Borse is Director and one of the founding partners of Faber Infinite Consulting (www.faberinfinite.com), with operations in Asia Pacific, Africa & Middle East. He holds a masters degree in Operations Management with his 1st degree being Mechanical Engineering.

This article was originally published on Economic Times – ETHealthworld.com. Original link available – here