Quality of care is more than just diagnosis and treatment
With two locations in the middle of the capital, top clinical hospital OLVG is also known as the city hospital of Amsterdam. Based on its mission “for a better life in a healthier Amsterdam”, OLVG provides high-quality care to more than 200,000 patients every year. In order to understand even better how these patients experience care, OLVG implemented two Patient Journeys™ together with Altuïtion.
OLVG is not only a household name in the Greater Amsterdam region, but is just as famous nationwide. The hospital is a regular feature in the top five hospitals that treat the most patients each year. Despite this workload, there is a strong focus on quality, which is deeply rooted in the organizational culture.
But that focus can also be too restrictive, says Sjoerd Korsmit, Marketing Consultant at OLVG. "In the medical sector, quality is mainly defined on the basis of the medical parameters aimed at physical discomfort, which is usually expressed in a diagnosis and treatment. But many other things also matter for patients, whether consciously or subconsciously. In fact, when assessing the medical quality of our hospital, non-medical aspects are decisive. A patient considers a quick and correct diagnosis and good treatment as more or less self-evident and finds it difficult to assess these elements. The real quality of care for the patient is often much more in the things that surround it: How am I treated? Are they really listening to what I have to say? Do they understand my concerns? Etc. Those are the things that we want to pay attention to.”
Multidisciplinary team
Although OLVG has an extensive toolbox for patient participation to involve patients, the hospital lacked a method to map the perception, experience, and emotion of patients during a random care route. That is why the hospital sought contact with Altuïtion, which, with its in-house developed Patient Journey™, offered the ideal tool for gaining a much broader and emotionally richer understanding of the patient.
"In order to familiarize ourselves with this method, we first asked Altuïtion to help us implement two Patient Journey™ routes within the orthopedics department,” explains Sjoerd Korsmit. “One for people who had torn their cruciate ligament and one for people who received a complete knee replacement after wear and tear. These are very different groups, with their own profile and their own needs, yet in both routes emotions play an important role.”
The goal of both Patient Journeys™ was to find new moments of truth within an organizational well-functioning care route that could improve the quality experience of patients. To this end, a multidisciplinary team was set up that meticulously mapped out the journey of both groups of patients, including the associated emotions.
"We really took the time to go into depth with each other in a very focused way. The process has generated a huge amount of positive energy: Participants have been enthusiastically involved from start to finish and started looking at their work and the patient differently. Altuïtion's approach and guidance have enabled us to achieve wonderful results. Now we're ready for a future in which experience can play a central role," says Korsmit. We now offer patients with a torn or suspected torn cruciate ligament a questionnaire before the first consultation. This provides an initial answer – one that suits their life, desires, and sporting ambitions – for either an operative or a conservative course of treatment. This allows them to enter into a more focused, more in-depth conversation with the doctor, which enables them to reach a decision faster – and with confidence – on whether or not to operate. In addition, for the patients who get a new knee, the individual home situation now serves as the basis for exercises with the physiotherapist.
Excellent methodology
Parallel to both Patient Journeys™, the Altuïtion consultants trained a team of OLVG staff in order to be able to roll out Patient Journeys™ for other departments in the future.
"We wanted a good balance between doing things together but also consciously doing a lot ourselves as OLVG,” explains Korsmit. “And that has been successful. Throughout the entire project, we worked together with the Altuïtion team in an extremely pleasant, professional, and fulfilling manner. This team consists of experienced people who are able to act quickly and have everything needed to take the 'patient experience' to the next level. At the same time, they were able to train our people in a very thorough, rock-solid methodology, in which we have a lot of faith. In that respect, I can definitely recommend Altuïtion to other parties, inside or outside the care sector."
