Vanderbilt’s dynamic, data-driven approach to personalizing care

Tools used

Survey and program design
Interactive dashboards
Data analysis
Action management

Improved action management and customized performance tracking enabled Vanderbilt Health providers to increase service recovery and further personalize the patient experience.

The challenge

Vanderbilt Health is an academic regional medical center located in Nashville, serving Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Mississippi. With a tagline of “Making Healthcare Personal,” its mission and vision revolve around extending health through the personalization of care.
Along the journey to more personalized care, Vanderbilt’s providers were looking for a way to gather consistent patient feedback to monitor behaviors and improve processes. Two groups piloted Press Ganey’s Human Experience platform to listen to the voice of the consumer to answer dynamic questions related to the patient experience. The urgent care team was looking for real-time data that would help them with in-the-moment service recovery, immediately addressing any patient concerns. Meanwhile, anesthesia was looking to track and visualize provider-specific feedback via personalized dashboards.

Having partners like Press Ganey helps us ‘Make Healthcare Personal.’ It’s a journey, and our partnership allows us to realize this mission with every patient, every time.
_{BRIAN CARLSON}
_{Vice President of Patient Experience, Vanderbilt Health}

Our solution

Gather

Vanderbilt partnered with Press Ganey to quickly set up surveys that would collect insights for the urgent care and anesthesia teams. These flexible, scalable surveys allowed for a dynamic question set and self-administration to solicit specific feedback and improve daily operations.

The solution allows survey administrators to be more nimble and tweak the survey if they aren’t getting the feedback they’re looking for, or if a process change is implemented.

Survey customization was important to each group for different reasons. Urgent care deployed five-question text surveys to reach patients more quickly, while anesthesia added physician photos to their multichannel surveys to help patients direct feedback about a specific interaction.

Analyze

If a survey respondent submitted a 1- or 2-star rating for the urgent care team, a case was created with that patient’s information. These cases funneled into a queue for managers to review. This functionality prioritized the most dissatisfied patients to aid in service recovery and created a workflow to aid in accountability.

Visualize

The anesthesia providers were committed to tracking their personal patient experience results. Press Ganey made this possible by enabling custom dashboards for each provider so they could quickly understand their performance and access valuable insights.

Act

Urgent care’s action management case queue allowed managers to review survey results immediately to determine if they needed to intervene with additional support. On average, 94% of cases were closed within just seven days of survey completion. This empowered real-time service recovery, taking action on Vanderbilt’s part to address any emotional harm, fear, or uncertainty among patients.

For anesthesia, the surveys provided quicker and more direct access to the voice of the patient—through text, email, and even QR code. This meant faster translation to operations, providing a choice for how each provider could improve or maintain care delivery.

The results

Vanderbilt Health’s Vice President of Patient Experience, Brian Carlson, shares tangible results from partnering with Press Ganey on these initiatives.

Increased speed of updating dynamic surveys

“The right people can go in and add questions and then take them off, because healthcare is a dynamic space and is constantly changing. We are constantly implementing new things and are looking for feedback on the effectiveness of these changes. Dynamic surveys allow us to turn on new questions immediately, with ease and simplicity.”

Real-time patient data

“We get data as close to that interaction as possible. And now with Press Ganey, we are building shorter surveys that can be sent directly after the visit, giving us some indication of the experience of the patient in that moment.”

As a result, urgent care’s facility database percentile rank improved 50 points since its lowest ranking, in 2020, and 14 points since 2022.

Actionable data visualizations

“With the advanced reporting functionality, we can take large streams of data and slice it in so many different ways in a very user-friendly and interactive type of way. It’s not too complex, allowing us to visualize the data so we can determine what we are going to do with it to further personalize care.”

Improvement by the numbers

94% of cases were closed, on average, within 7 days of survey completion.

Urgent care’s facility database percentile rank improved 50 points since their lowest ranking in 2020, and 14 points since 2022.

Using Press Ganey’s Action Management tool, clinic managers can build trust and loyalty by connecting with the patient to perform service recovery and personally close the loop.

The Press Ganey platform’s customizable surveys let urgent care build a survey and dashboard, tailored to its unique patient population, to identify areas for continued growth.