In 2007 Novant Health’s leadership charted an aggressive and exciting direction for the organization to create a Remarkable Patient Experience. While no one could argue in principle with this commitment, Novant Health’s challenge was to define this Remarkable Patient Experience and operationalize it across a complex healthcare system that includes three major regional medical centers, several community hospitals, outpatient clinics, physician practices, and a host of ancillary services, including one of the largest pharmacies in the Southeast.
To assist in this massive 18-month initiative, Novant Health contracted with IDEAS to identify the elements and attributes of this Remarkable Patient Experience, create a foundation story to communicate this vision, define and develop guidelines for consistently implementing it across all Novant Health locations, and create training resources to ensure that staff could deliver on this considerable promise.
Task one was to better understand Novant Health’s culture and how it impacts the patient experience, so the IDEAS team spent three weeks observing nearly every aspect of the organization’s operations from outpatient services to hospitalization across their major geographic locations, including facilities in Charlotte, Winston-Salem, and Brunswick on the coast. In addition to shadowing key healthcare personnel, the team conducted extensive interviews with patients, leaders, and clinical and non-clinical support personnel.
Emerging from this rich narrative data was a distinctive picture of each aspect of the organization as it relates to the patient experience. In association with Novant Health’s leadership team, IDEAS is currently formulating a suite of story-based interventions, experience design guidelines, and enculturation tools to assist Novant Health as they make the Remarkable Patient Experience the norm, not the exception at every step of the patient’s journey.
