Payors, including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), increasingly have the expectation that the experience of the patient be considered an essential quality outcome and included in the ongoing monitoring and evaluation of the effectiveness of program delivery. CMS has likewise implemented a patient experience survey of its Beneficiary and Family Centered Care organizations (BFCC-QIOs) and how they deliver regulatory-driven services related to (1) discharge and service termination appeals; (2) quality of care complaints, leading to medical record review or immediate advocacy; and (3) person and family engagement activities, including delivery of patient navigation support. As a BFCC-QIO, Livanta LLC analyzes that patient experience qualitative feedback data to make it transparent to operational leadership and to senior leadership and uses it to drive process improvement initiatives.

Descriptive analysis of comments data makes patient experience feedback more accessible to staff, to drive and support internal process improvement. Separating those comments that were about the regulations established by the payor versus those that were about the process under the control of the organization delivering the services helped highlight what information was best shared back to the payor and what information was most potentially actionable for process improvement at the operational front line.

Kathryn Empson is the Director for Quality Assurance & Standardization at Livanta.

The full text article is available in the September/October 2019 issue of Journal of Healthcare Compliance.