"Nothing Is More Powerful than Words:" How Patient Experience Narratives Enable Improvement.

Background And Objectives: Patient experience narratives (narratives) are an increasingly important element of both measurement approaches and improvement efforts in healthcare. Prior studies show that narratives are considered by both clinicians and staff to be an appealing, meaningful, and credible form of evidence on performance. They also suggest that making concrete use of narratives within organizational settings to improve care can be complex and challenging.

Leveraging Patients' Creative Ideas for Innovation in Health Care.

Unlabelled: Policy Points Patients' creative ideas may inform learning and innovation that improve patient-centered care. Routinely collected patient experience surveys provide an opportunity to invite patients to share their creative ideas for improvement. We develop and assess a methodological strategy that validates question wording designed to elicit creative ideas from patients.

Learning from patients: The impact of using patients' narratives on patient experience scores.

Background: Enthusiasm has grown about using patients' narratives-stories about care experiences in patients' own words-to advance organizations' learning about the care that they deliver and how to improve it, but studies confirming association have not been published.

Purpose: We assessed whether primary care clinics that frequently share patients' narratives with their staff have higher patient experience survey scores.

Approach: We conducted a 1-year study of 5,545 adult patients and 276 staff affiliated with nine clinics in one health system.

Assessing an innovative method to promote learning from patient narratives: Findings from a field experiment in ambulatory care.

Objective: To assess whether an online interactive report designed to facilitate interpretation of patients' narrative feedback produces change in ambulatory staff learning, behavior at the individual staff and practice level, and patient experience survey scores.

Data Sources And Setting: We studied 22 ambulatory practice sites within an academic medical center using three primary data sources: 333 staff surveys; 20 in-depth interviews with practice leaders and staff; and 9551 modified CG-CAHPS patient experience surveys augmented by open-ended narrative elicitation questions.

Study Design: We conducted a cluster quasi-experimental study, comparing 12 intervention and 10 control sites.

Summary of the 2020 AHRQ research meeting on 'advancing methods of implementing and evaluating patient experience improvement using consumer assessment of healthcare providers and systems (CAHPS®) surveys'.

Background: The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality held a research meeting on using Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS®) data for quality improvement (QI) and evaluating such efforts.

Topics Covered.: Meeting addressed: 1)What has been learned about organizational factors/environment needed to improve patient experience? 2)How have organizations used data to improve patient experience? 3)What can evaluations using CAHPS data teach us about implementing successful programs to improve patient experience?

Key Themes: Providers and stakeholders need to be engaged early and often, standardize QI processes, complement CAHPS data with other data, and compile dashboards of CAHPS scores to identify and track improvement.