by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | April 24, 2020
From the April 2020 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Breezeway between hospital and office building
We also have engaged the Ritz-Carlton to help us in creating a culture of service here that emphasizes a customer experience where we get to know our patients and patient families on a personal level. We understand what’s important to them not only about their health and outcomes, but what’s important about their family. So it’s very much a culture where we’re promoting outstanding care, but also supporting patients and families in a very unique way.
HCB News: Can you give some details about the mock events?
BL: So we spent three months before we opened the hospital with a group of about 100 people in various areas that would be working in the hospital. We also had partners from both our academic as well as community physician groups that helped us look at every process in the hospital — from how you register a patient to what happens if you have a code in the neonatal intensive care unit — to make sure we had a good understanding of how we wanted to respond to each of those issues.
Still, because it’s a new team in a new facility, even though we had the space designed we hadn’t really worked out how we wanted our patients to interact with the space or how we wanted our staff to interact. We felt the only way we could do that without practicing on the first patient who came through the door was to have mock patients come through. So we spent a day in November of 2019 just sending mock patients through about 400 scenarios. We came up with scenarios that tested multiple different workflows and patients with a variety of different health issues that tested different parts of the system. After that first day-in-the-life event, we had a full debrief to discuss what worked and what didn’t. We had about 60 pages of notes that were modifications in the workflow. The second day-in-the-life event occurred about two weeks before opening in early December. It really allowed us to test our system in a way that made us very confident that we could care for that first patient that walked through the door.
HCB News: You mentioned you engaged the Ritz-Carlton — can you explain that relationship?
