Blog: What’s good for the patient is good for the clinician—skills to enhance the patient experience help clinicians feel better, too.

Ryan Chesterman, NAPA Service Experience Coach
Research finds that anesthesia clinicians trained in communication and compassion skills boost patient satisfaction, report lower levels of burnout, and experience higher levels of empathy.

-Dr. Gary Friedman, President, New Hampshire Society of Anesthesiologists and Chairman, Department of Anesthesia, Southern New Hampshire Medical Center

Since hospitals and physician groups began publicly reporting patient experience results, sparking the age of consumerism, the healthcare industry has learned a lot about why patient feedback matters. We know that improving communication between the clinician and the patient yields better patient experience survey scores. We know how higher scores relate to profitability, and how that in turn drives the ways that clinicians deliver patient care. Increasingly, studies show correlations between patient experiences and clinical health outcomes. We even know what we don’t know: healthcare is now looking to hospitality, technology and other industries to discern how to succeed in a consumer-driven world.¹

Reaching ever higher can have dramatic effects on patient, clinician, and administration satisfaction. Share on X

As we study ways to create optimal patient experiences, clinicians may be surprised to learn that some of the most effective techniques can help them improve their own personal and career experiences as well. Evidence-based research at The Cleveland Clinic has shown that after clinicians received training in communication skills designed to help them build compassionate patient relationships, the clinicians themselves reported lower levels of burnout (in terms of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal achievement) and higher levels of empathy. The same clinicians also reported high satisfaction with the training course, which they said enhanced their knowledge with valuable skills and changed their attitudes. And the clinicians weren’t the only ones to reap benefits: “in this observational study in a large health system, experiential, relationship-centered communication skills training effectively improved outpatient scores and one domain of inpatient scores.”²

Compassion (and its demonstration by both verbal and non-verbal communication actions such as eye contact and body language), is so critical to healthcare outcomes that Stephen Trzeciak, MD, MPH has proposed a new field of scientific study called “compassionomics” to measure the effects of compassionate healthcare.³ But as many clinicians will readily admit, effective patient communication is not something they learned in medical or nursing school.

Direct one-on-one coaching has the potential to improve clinician-patient communication as well as clinician and patient satisfaction compared with other techniques commonly used. Share on X

-Kathryn I. Pollak, PhD, Xiaomei Gao, MA & Laura P. Svetkey, MD, MHS, Duke University School of Medicine, Duke Cancer Institute. Coach, Don’t Just Teach. NEJM Catalyst. January 17, 2019.

Recognizing that anesthesia clinicians are uniquely positioned to deliver compassionate perioperative care, NAPA has been at the forefront of initiatives to create exceptional patient experiences. Among its robust clinical and leadership training programs for physicians and CRNAs, in 2015 NAPA partnered with Studer Group to create the NAPA Service Experience, focused on empowering clinicians with strategies to improve communication and accountability. Two years later, NAPA strengthened its commitment by investing in a new, internal role of Service Experience Coach, a unique position that elevates NAPA by putting real muscle behind the motivation to enhance the patient experience. As NAPA’s Service Experience Coach, I focus on helping NAPA clinicians better connect with patients and their families, because we know that in healthcare, building human connections is a win-win-win for everyone.

“Each of our practices throughout NAPA provide care in different local cultures, but the elevation of service experience can be a uniform characteristic of the professional services that we deliver,” says Gary Friedman, MD, FASA, President of the New Hampshire Society of Anesthesiologists and Chairman of the Department of Anesthesia at Southern New Hampshire Medical Center. “Reaching ever higher can have dramatic effects on patient, clinician, and administration satisfaction. We’ve incorporated some of Ryan’s suggestions, after he had the opportunity to talk with us in a group setting and observe us in one-on-one interactions with patients. This was invaluable for our practice and will be invaluable to our partner facilities. The response from patients is amazing.”

1 Jon Bees. Survey Snapshot: The Patient-Physician Relationship is Key. NEJM Catalyst (catalyst.nejm.org) Insights Report. February 12, 2019.

2 Adrienne Boissy, MD, MA, Amy K. Windover, PhD, Dan Bokar, Matthew Karafa, PhD, Katie Neuendorf, MD, Richard M. Frankel, PhD, James Merlino, MD, and Michael B. Rothberg, MD, MPH. Communication Skills Training for Physicians Improves Patient Satisfaction. J Gen Intern Med 31(7):755-61.

3 Stephen Trzeciak, Brian W. Roberts, Anthony J. Mazzarelli. Compassionomics: Hypothesis and experimental approach. ScienceDirect. Medical Hypotheses, Volume 107, September 2017, Pages 92-97. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2017.08.015