When Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno, California launched an initiative to boost its Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems scores, the team combined leadership engagement, a comprehensive and ongoing staff education plan, and deployed new bedside technology.

“We needed to ensure that patient education is part of the nursing day, and we’re using technology to make that happen, to be more efficient,” said Peggy Grant, director of professional practice for CRMC, which is part of Community Medical Centers of Central California.

Grant will share the facility’s experiences equipping nurses with bedside tools to educate patients at the HIMSS16 conference in Las Vegas next month.

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In her session, “Hardwiring Technology into Care Delivery to Increase HCAHPS” Grant plans to explain how CRMC streamlined the delivery and documentation of medication teaching to nurses at patients’ bedsides, for instance, as well as other methods and tools for increasing patient satisfaction and increasing HCAHPS scores.

The medical center began integrating Interactive Patient Care (IPC) software with its electronic health record systems and other health IT technologies in 2013 to improve clinical workflows and to document medication teaching. Units at CRMC utilizing IPC for at least three months demonstrated significant improvements in their HCAHPS scores.

What’s more, the impact of the initiative has “gone beyond the HCAHPS scores themselves and has really impacted clinical practice” by leveraging technology to train staff, educate patients and measure results, Grant said.

“We’ve been able to get data from our EHR, such as how many videos are ordered by staff, and the percentage of videos ordered by staff compared to length of stay,” she added. “So unit managers can look at that data and know how much education their patients are getting and correlate that to outcomes.”

And while the technology itself is important, Grant says hospitals also must apply strong leadership engagement and a solid education plan to get buy-in from staff. “That’s something we’re constantly working on,” she said. HIMSS16 attendees who might benefit most from this session include nursing and hospital unit leaders as well as healthcare IT professionals.

“Hardwiring Technology into Care Delivery to Increase HCAHPS” will be held Tuesday, March 1, from 1 to 2 p.m. PST in the Sands Expo Convention Center, Lando 4201.

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