What Healthcare Leaders Must Do to Enhance Patient Satisfaction

An increasing number of healthcare institutions have begun tracking medical outcomes, discovering that the initial phase is often the most challenging. This process requires overcoming resistance to change, redesigning workflows, enhancing cross-departmental coordination, and investing in new resources. In short, these efforts demand strong determination and professional leadership.

So, how do today’s healthcare leaders implement evaluations in hospitals and clinical settings? Drawing on years of collaborative experience, we have distilled three leadership principles:

1. Cultivating Trusted Individuals

Clinical key opinion leaders who pay close attention to medical outcomes and maintain open communication with their colleagues. Many of these individuals may have already collected outcome data, albeit in unstructured formats. Clinical key opinion leaders can help address early-stage challenges.
Dr. Ryan Uitti, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic, has maintained a simple spreadsheet to track patients with Parkinson’s disease for over a decade. Last year, the Mayo Clinic Center for Digital Health partnered with Dr. Uitti to launch a more comprehensive measurement initiative.

Dr. Uitti holds the pioneering rights and has helped expand this initiative across the entire Mayo Clinic enterprise. The pioneering effort quickly attracted the attention of other physicians, a significant number of whom intended to pilot the measurement methods in patients with stroke, hip and knee osteoarthritis, depression, and anxiety. Ultimately, Mayo Clinic chose to partner with a third-party IT solutions company to deploy a system that supports efficient and secure data collection.

2. Possess appropriate cross-team management capabilities

Appoint a project lead to direct the team, establish final deadlines for objectives—such as signing a contract with an IT vendor or obtaining ethical approval (if required)—and share collective team responsibility.

At Boston Children's Hospital, when Dr. John Meara began diagnosing children with cleft lip, his first step was to select calm, objective, and competent leaders to establish a multidisciplinary team capable of driving the entire process forward.

To engage a broader range of stakeholders, the team also established a steering committee comprising representatives from otolaryngology, oral and maxillofacial surgery, dentistry and orthodontics, audiology, genetics, psychiatry, and anesthesiology. Dr. Meara and the current project team provide quarterly progress updates to the committee, aiming to gather feedback and input before determining subsequent steps.

3. Celebrate smooth progress in a timely manner to boost morale

Successful evaluation takes time. The team at Stanford University used an electronic medical record system to reduce patients' visit times by 10%. Achieving this actually took more than two years. What kept the entire team moving forward was, in part, celebrating interim successes.

Translation: Liu Jianqiu

Responsible Editor: Zhang Nan