This blog post continues our series of HealthStream Coaching's patient experience best practices. As we look at best practices for using healthcare standards of performance, we will share some specific examples. This week we examine standards for attitude and appearance.

This blog post continues our series of HealthStream Coaching's patient experience best practices. Every week we share information from our coaches that demonstrates their expansive understanding of the challenges faced by healthcare organizations and the solutions they have identified for improving the patient experience and patient and business outcomes. This week we examine standards for commitment to coworkers and customer waiting.

As an essential part of an organization’s workforce strategy, the annual employee engagement survey provides organization-wide feedback for an overall view of the health of an organization and the factors influencing business outcomes. Employee engagement is the metric that drives everything else, and when scores rise or fall, other metrics, such as financial or operational performance, and patient satisfaction can climb or dip with it.

In order for Standards of Performance to become ingrained in a healthcare organization's culture, they must be hardwired so that employees live and breathe them daily. Communication is the key to making a permanent connection between the Standards and the behaviors that most exemplify the culture, serving as the backbone of its success.

Doctors, just like all of your staff, deserve and want to be recognized and rewarded for their contributions to the organization. The HealthStream Engagement Institute recommends developing multiple ways to recognize physicians. The following are some suggestions:

The beauty of using the pursuit of Magnet® designation as the framework for your cultural transformation is that it sets out clear parameters for all aspects of the transformation. The very pursuit of Magnet® designation will almost certainly bring your organization a myriad of improvements in nursing excellence, nurse satisfaction, and nurse retention.