Lexington Medical Center - West Columbia, SC

Success Story Finalist

In January of 2000, Lexington Medical Center identified patient satisfaction as one of our strategic goals. One area that has made a dramatic turnaround is Inpatient Services, going from the 64th percentile in 1999 to the 98th percentile in 2002.

Organization-wide efforts focused on:

• Response to complaints and concerns.
• Establishing patient satisfaction as a priority within our culture.
• Employee reinforcement and recognition.

The new service philosophy was to view concerns and complaints as “gifts” because they give us the opportunity to make things right for the patient or family and to improve processes. The GIFT formula:

• Give a sincere apology.
• Inform the patient of how you will address their concerns.
• Fix the problem, follow through and follow up.
• Thank the patient for bringing the issue to our attention.

A new team recommended several ways to recognize employees:

• VIP pin – designed for an employee to pass to another employee in recognition of extraordinary service.
• Applause cards – designed to give a short thank you and recognition.
• Handwritten notes from the COO were sent to each employee that received a favorable comment on a survey.

As we evaluated continued improvements, we built on “Service With A Passion” and introduced the next step, “Service In Action.” We used the hot air balloon as our theme and focused on three areas for service in the year, ACT: Attitude, Commitment, Teamwork.

The Inpatient team started digging deeper into their data by unit:

• The top box analysis was used to establish areas we could bring scores from “4’s” to “5’s.”
• We statistically analyzed each unit to determine whether we had significant gains or declines. We recognized areas on the survey that met goals for 4 consecutive quarters.

Digging deeper identified training and team building opportunities. A process to strengthen the leadership team with a focus on feedback, communication, role clarification, and service expectation was developed. This led to a decrease in turnover and an increase in staff and patient satisfaction.

Our Inpatient areas were able to obtain and sustain high scores. Our mean score was 82.4 in November 1999, and in December 2003, was 88.2.