Healthcare Interests

SSMHC Improves Patient Satisfaction Through Better Data Analysis

SSM Health Care, based in St. Louis, MO, is one of the largest Catholic health care systems in the country. The system owns, operates and manages 21 acute care hospitals and three nursing homes in four midwestern states. Nearly 5,000 affiliated physicians and 23,000 employees work together to provide a wide range of high-quality services.

Dimensional Insight's Diver Solution plays an important role in assessing performance and identifying opportunities for improvement within the system. Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) teams at each hospital use Diver to track patient satisfaction rates from patient surveys. Their efforts to improve quality of care have been recognized: SSM Health Care won the Missouri State Quality Award for excellence in quality leadership, and also won the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 2002, becoming the first health care organization in the country to do so.

Rhonda Warren is SSM Health Care's lead Customer Research Consultant. She is responsible for building and maintaining patient survey data Models from SPSS files, developing standard electronic reports for distribution to nearly all of the system's hospitals and creating customized views for users upon request. Each of SSM Health Care's data Models are updated monthly. "A survey has about 50 items ranging from pain control, to call light response, to temperature of the food," Warren explains. "We use regression analysis when analyzing the survey data. This tells us how important a particular item is to a patient. We also factor in the hospital's actual performance on each item. The two variables together help our hospitals better understand the key drivers of patient satisfaction, allowing them to determine where they can be more effective in their improvement efforts."

Warren has made it easy for SSMHC's hospitals to reveal important issues in the data, as well as measure progress toward improvements. All patients are divided into three groups: highly satisfied, satisfied, and least satisfied. Each report shows the current month's breakout of those three groups compared to the same month last year. "We consider highly satisfied patients to be what other companies outside of health care would call loyal customers," Warren says. 'Loyal customers' give positive recommendations about the hospital to others. "A good word-of-mouth recommendation is one of the more important factors someone considers when they select a hospital," she says.

All hospitals are able to see satisfaction results for each of the other hospitals in the system. The hospitals compare their hospital average with the region average, as well as the entire system average. If one of the hospitals has a low satisfaction rate within a survey item, they contact those hospitals within the system that have a high satisfaction rate for advice. In addition, users are able to investigate reasons behind their low satisfaction rates and compare the rates of different time periods.

Various relations training programs benefit from the information that is revealed with Diver reports. Relations training programs staff are able to teach hospital personnel where they can manage expectations, how to anticipate questions and how to communicate better with patients.

Satisfaction with pain management for women delivering babies was lower than the average, so SSMHC used Diver to find out why. SSMHC found that women in the 26 and under category, a group most likely to include more first-time mothers, were very unsatisfied with pain management. SSMHC took action, not by giving more drugs, but by managing expectations. Explaining to first-time mothers about the pain they were really going to experience raised pain management satisfaction rates. In the emergency room, satisfaction rates for waiting time improved when personnel periodically reassured patients that they had not been forgotten.

SSMHC has also found uses for linking survey data with clinical data. Warren builds a Model every month with information from their clinical information system. It allows SSMHC to match the patient identification number to a number that links diagnostic data to the patient survey. "We can look at satisfaction rates of patients who had bypass surgery, for example, and link survey data back to clinical data. We have information about who their primary payor was because satisfaction rates of people by different HMOs is important, especially when negotiating contracts," Warren says.

With Diver, SSMHC's users are able to look at all categories that link back to patient satisfaction, sort through thousands of patients and perform ad-hoc analysis. Users are able to compare hospitals, nursing units, regions, days, months, inpatients, outpatients, sex, and age with the click of a mouse.

"The problem I'm aware of with other reporting software systems is actually getting the reports out of them," Warren says. "You go through a series of queries to get a static report and it stops there. Diver lets you 'dive' into the data to obtain successively more detailed levels of information without having to write numerous queries. Diver makes it possible to instantly view and explore data summaries by any number of survey dimensions. Users dive through Dimensions as they choose to better understand the key drivers of patient satisfaction, thus allowing them to be more effective in their improvement efforts. Our users are thrilled they finally have fast, intuitive access to their data, enabling them to improve processes and achieve new levels of performance in health care delivery."