It was fall, and I had just been hired to lead community outreach and patient engagement for an organization centered on serving patients with chronic conditions. Anchored in the heart of value-based care, the organization focused on work that would keep older adults and patients with chronic conditions well at home, improving health outcomes and reducing avoidable hospitalizations. Paramount to this work was an understanding of how our providers (MDs, DOs, NPs, and PAs) collaborated with our field based social workers, medical assistants and administrative team to make the work happen.
On one particular day, we visited a patient, winding down a dirt road among tiny bungalows in the country. The social worker and I arrived twenty minutes early. Upon arriving and knocking on the door, an older man answered the door. He grumpily complained, “You’re really early. Come back in an hour when I’ve had my lunch.”
We sat in the car and waited. When we returned, we timidly knocked on the door again, unsure if he would refuse the visit. The man warmly invited us in and apologized for being upset. We asked about whether he had medication changes, any recent falls, and what concerns he had regarding his health. Over the next half an hour, it was clear the man was simply lonely. His wife had recently passed away and he noted that he still watched her favorite soap operas every day. He talked about his time in the service, his excitement for an upcoming football game, that he liked Progresso soup more than Campbell’s and that he rarely saw his sister or brother.
By shadowing the social worker in the field, I had a new appreciation for my work in planning and executing outreach strategies to our patients with chronic conditions. My goal was also to look for ways to improve both the patient and provider experience. Of all of the strategies that I’ve used in my career in customer and patient experience over the years, the one that most reliably pays dividends is: Go and see the work.
In going and seeing the work, we made the patient journey that was invisible visible. Think whiteboards and markers. How long does each step in the patient onboarding lifecycle take? Where does work get stuck or delayed? How do communications ping-pong back and forth between leaders, providers, field staff, patients, and their physicians? In what steps do the greatest leaps forward seem to happen? Those were steps that we would protect. In what steps did the efforts seem to complicate the patient’s experience? We would aim to rework those.
The critical observation was that this was a departure from normal, everyday work because we were suddenly substituting actual experience for conjecture. When an idea came to the board room as interdisciplinary staff sat around the table, it wasn’t just a guess but based on dedicated experience in the field. This direct experience, and the go and see were items that we could make decisions from.
Had we not come back after the first encounter with this patient or rushed along and told him we would just reschedule the visit, we wouldn’t have had the experience of connecting with a man who was simply lonely and enjoyed sharing time with visitors. He showed us his bird feeders on the porch and pointed to the blue jays in a tree across a small brook before we left for our next patient.
Go and see the work and you may discover information and perspectives that you might not have received the first time around. It may be something that makes your day – and theirs too.
I am a passionate writer and customer experience strategiest who enjoys writing about human experience and the intersection of healthcare. The views in my writing are my own and do not reflect the positions of any organizations I may represent.
