Putting patient safety into practice: improving access across healthcare organizations

You're approaching this as both a clinician and as someone who leads patient access.

At your organization, you reduced the median time to offer an appointment from five days to two, and in some cases to just one day.

But you've also said that required buy-in across a lot of different teams.

When clinicians and administrative teams are working toward the same goal, they don't always speak the same language.

So how do you get everyone aligned around patient safety when they may be coming at a problem from different perspectives? How do you make sure that the goal is the same?

You're absolutely right.

It's a good goal to have and also it's a big challenge.

So going to your question of speaking the same language, that's a true challenge.

And in an effort to simplify a little bit the question and the impact of a different language, let's just take three stakeholder groups and see how that can translate between the three of them.

So you have the clinical teams, you have the administrative staff that goes through the scheduling process and our frontline staff, you have the patient.

Speaking the same language is so critical in order for the same messages to be communicated accurately and everybody to be understanding the same thing.

And sometimes you need to pivot in the way that you explain things, the way that you describe things, or even the words that you use.

You can see that when clinical teams are instructing administrative teams on specific questions, in which way we need to adjust the communication strategy between the two groups so that both groups are understanding the same message, although different words may be used.

And at the end of the day, and most importantly, it doesn't matter what I say as a clinician.

It doesn't matter what the administrative team is going to say on the phone call.

It will have zero impact if the patient doesn't comprehend what we say.

And there is a lot of intentionality and strategy that goes behind what I just described.

It doesn't happen by accident.

So when we review, for example, scheduling algorithms, There are whole groups of people who assess whether a question may be understood or not, first by the administrative staff, second by the patient, and vice versa.

So you are very right that the language matters.

Speaking the same language matters because at the end of the day, that's what's going to lead to alignment of expectations between all those groups that I just described.