Industry Voices—Executing on your patient satisfaction goals is within your power

Improving patient satisfaction scores is a challenge that almost all healthcare facilities face. That challenge is made all the more frustrating since, by and large, hospital leaders actually know what is needed to improve their HCAHPS numbers. Since the early 2000s, assessment and consulting groups like Studer Consulting and Press Ganey Analytics have published their findings on the critical behaviors for hospital staff that predictably improve patient satisfaction scores. In our experience working with dozens of hospitals, not only are hospital administrators keenly aware of these behaviors, but their managers, staff and clinicians are as well. This raises an obvious question: If they know what to do, why are they struggling to do it?