Why did this hospital take the initiative to "welcome"? , in the face of patient complaints that are often regarded as "negative equity"
"Doctor, can I do a brain CT directly today? Do I need to make an appointment?"
"Hello, the air conditioning in the outpatient building is too cold. Where should I report it?"
As the business volume of medical institutions continues to grow, the number of patients they face and deal with doctor-patient conflicts has also increased significantly. For public hospitals, promoting the high-quality development of hospitals not only means the continuous improvement of medical technology, but also means the comprehensive optimization of medical service models and patient experience. How to capture the "voice" of patients in a timely manner, smooth communication channels for demands, and quickly respond to patients' "urgent needs and worries" has become the primary problem that public hospitals currently need to solve.
Can you take a step forward? In August 2022, Shanghai First People's Hospital actively cooperated with the Shanghai Health Hotline to reshape the patient complaint management process, create a new "service defect management system", innovatively build a "new model of hospital chain linkage", and through "frontline direct "Three parties jointly handle" and "handle before filing a lawsuit" handed over a valid answer sheet to the patient.
Vice President Sun Xiaodong said that the model of co-construction of hospital and citizen hotlines and dedicated personnel visiting is a precedent in Shanghai and even the country. With the continuous advancement of this model, the hospital's response rate within 48 hours currently exceeds 90%, and hotline transfer work orders have basically achieved "negative growth", truly achieving "all patient complaints are responded to and implemented."
Turning complexity into one, “front-line direct handling” smoothes the channels for appeals
Many hospital pharmacies must have the same troubles: every beginning of the month, there will be a sudden increase in calls for various types of drug searches, drug inquiries, and drug searches. According to the practice of major hospitals, consultation calls will first be answered by the switchboard and then transferred to the pharmacy or outpatient service desk. But during the peak hours of outpatient service, the pharmacy is busy preparing and dispensing medicines, leaving the landline unattended; some calls will be returned to the switchboard, while others will be hung up directly; if the consultation is transferred to the outpatient department, the situation may not be good. Patients on the scene didn't understand why the staff didn't answer questions and were answering the phone instead; and patients online didn't understand why after a round of calls, they either couldn't find the reception department or couldn't get an effective answer.
When “online and offline” questions are not resolved promptly and effectively, they may escalate into complaints to the health hotline. "We analyzed the content of hotline work orders item by item in the past two years and found that nearly 30% of the work orders were consultation issues." According to Chai Shuang, director of the Patient Experience Department, such consultation problems are not difficult to solve, but the challenges faced The "real crux" is that the hospital switchboard operator cannot accurately reply to every patient's question, and the clinical frontline who transfers the call has no time to answer them one by one.
How to effectively reduce the burden on both doctors and patients? In October 2022, the one-stop "Consultation and Treatment Center" of a city hospital will be established and put into operation. Based on the work structure, operating mechanism, and management methods of the health hotline, the hospital fully combined its own conditions to create a "one-line, one-code communication platform." On the one hand, dozens of consultation numbers that used to be scattered in various departments and departments were integrated into a hotline to achieve "someone can answer the phone and ask questions". At the same time, a listening "code" was set up to achieve "convenient scanning code evaluation. Get a reply quickly”.
Sharing data, "three-party co-operation" to speed up response efficiency
"Hello, this is the 12320 health hotline. In response to your previous request, I will give you a reply..." The hotline operator Xiaotian searched the database for the corresponding information of the city's first hospital and dialed the number of the patient Ms. Zhang.
After solving the problem of "no way to ask for help" for 30% of patients, a city hospital found that more than half of the remaining 70% of work orders were "immediate treatment problems", that is, as long as the patient's problem can be solved within a short time, With quick feedback and efficient response, the case can be settled. How can patients who have sought help from the health hotline receive effective answers in the short term? A city hospital has launched the first "hospital chain linkage sharing model". On the basis of the original health hotline's "dispatch of orders and transfer", "three parties co-operate and dedicated personnel visit" will be realized.
For some simple consultation questions from incoming patients, hotline staff can directly answer them based on their own database and the database of the first city hospital. When the shared database is not effectively covered, or the hotline operator cannot give an accurate answer, the operator will contact the city's first consultation and treatment center after understanding the basic situation, and initiate a "patient-hotline-hospital" three-way call, and the hospital consultation and treatment center will directly intervene for the patient. FAQ. In addition, the first city hospital also dispatched specialists to the city health hotline to stay on site to further meet the needs of various personalized patients.
Thanks to a series of high-efficiency combinations, the response time to patients' complaints has been shortened, the work orders to hospitals transferred by the hotline have also been reduced, and the burden on hospitals and hotlines has also been effectively reduced. According to reports, currently nearly 60% of work orders have been shortened to 48 hours, further improving patient satisfaction.
Reshape management and solve the problem of medical treatment by "doing it before filing a lawsuit"
It can be said that there are no meaningless complaints and there are no invalid complaints. Behind the calls from patients may be a type of neglected medical issues. What the hospital has to do is to discover the problems hidden behind the complaints, and then improve and establish new systems and processes to meet patients' growing needs for a sense of medical experience and gain.
"Most hospitals generally have a negative attitude toward the complaints received from citizen hotlines and health hotlines. They give them headaches and think they are 'negative equity'." Chai Shuang lamented that in fact, these complaints were made by ordinary people on their own initiative. , is the best channel for hospitals to obtain people’s voices. The existing "internal communication and external communication" is only the starting point of service innovation, and is far from the end of management innovation.
To this end, in July 2023, the No. 1 Hospital in the city passed the "Work Plan on Further Improving Patient Service Quality" to further improve the three-level management structure of the leadership group, special work classes, and clinical groups, with horizontal collaboration between functional departments and linkage between clinical departments. , reshape the appeal management process and build a closed-loop management mechanism of training, acceptance, disposal, improvement, evaluation, and assessment. In accordance with the principle of "doing one thing well and solving one type of thing", improvement and optimization are promoted at four levels: first, department benchmarking improvement, that is, in response to existing problems, the department takes the initiative to improve and improve service temperature from details; second, the hospital The third is rapid optimization and improvement, that is, rapid feedback and rapid optimization for concentrated problems exposed in the short term; the fourth is key optimization and improvement, that is, focusing on repetitive and complex problems. Special classes are dedicated to studying and discussing stubborn and stubborn issues, and multiple departments work together to promote implementation.
At the same time, the hospital has innovatively built a "service evaluation and defect management platform", established a "dual channel" for PC and mobile phones, configured multiple management roles such as hospital leaders, functional departments, clinical departments, etc., and hierarchically classified and matched management permissions. . Through direct procurement from the system combined with manual registration, full-scale statistics of appeal management data are achieved, management data is cleared every day, and weekly and monthly reports are further formed. With the vigorous promotion of actions to improve patient service quality, in September 2023, the city's hotline work orders showed "negative growth" for the first time, and the hospital hotline work orders throughout the year have basically achieved "zero growth."
