Ama healthier life steps program

Nutrition and calorie information on food labels is typically based on a 2, calorie per day diet. You may need fewer or more calories depending on several factors including age, gender, and level of physical activity.

Increase the amount and intensity of your physical activity to burn more calories. Aim for at least minutes of moderate physical activity or 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity or an equal combination of both each week. Eat an overall healthy dietary pattern that emphasizes: a wide variety of fruits and vegetables whole grains and products made up mostly of whole grains healthy sources of protein mostly plants such as legumes and nuts ; fish and seafood ; low-fat or nonfat dairy; and, if you eat meat and poultry, ensuring it is lean and unprocessed liquid non-tropical vegetable oils minimally processed foods minimized intake of added sugars foods prepared with little or no salt limited or preferably no alcohol intake Apply this guidance wherever food is prepared or consumed.

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Share the results of your assessment of the current state of the patient experience and discuss reactions and trends. Hold a brainstorming session to come up with ideas for your patient experience platform. Take the opportunity to ask employees about the challenges they face in daily operations to identify areas where additional training could be useful.

You can also include patients in the design process by holding a focus group to evaluate ideas. Why is it so important to include stakeholders at all levels in experience design? There is not one ideal patient experience program, as different practices and patients will have varying preferences and expectations. Including stakeholders from all levels and areas in your practice can help you uncover valuable and sometimes surprising insights. For example, team members who work in the front desk area may notice that there is inadequate seating on busy clinic days or that the waiting area music is too loud.

These are things that care team members may notice in passing without recognizing the impact that they are having on a patient's experience. Patients can offer the customer perspective that staff can often forget when they are focused on their work. That is why it is important to include personnel at all levels of your organization and partner with your patients to create a program that best fits your environment and patient population.

Should we consider including other types of clinicians or services in the planning stages? This will depend on your practice type, location and size, but it can be an important consideration.

For example, if you are a surgical practice, you encounter your patients not only in the clinic but also in the operating room. Patients look at their experience in its entirety so they often don't distinguish between the two distinct care environments and staff. In this scenario, you may decide to include pre-operative testing staff, surgical waiting room staff and nurses and the patient transport team in your experience design process because their feedback may cover both environments.

Patients often have complaints about billing processes, so including leadership from this group in experience design can also be beneficial. Should we benchmark against other practices or organizations in our area to help set strategy? While you may choose to look at what your competitors are doing well and emulate best practices, this should not be the major driver for creating a patient experience program. Vendors exist that enable benchmarking, but if your efforts are grounded in your local culture and patient needs, you are on the right track.

Work with your patient experience program team to determine which processes or changes to implement first. To ensure success, start small and pick an option that is sustainable and scalable for your practice. Here are some ideas:.

A PFAC is a partnership between patients, families, caregivers and members of the care team that encourages honest feedback and constructive criticism to make the practice better. A PFAC ensures the voice of the consumer is integrated into prioritization of decisions your practice makes related to changes that will affect the patient community.

Strengthening the partnership between the practice and its patients can help you achieve goals and provide better care to patients. Rounding enables the clinic leadership to connect with patients in real time to gain a deeper understanding of tactics to strengthen care. This approach also provides opportunities for immediate service recovery and feedback for staff and physicians.

You could assign a team of leaders to specific clinics or request that the manager, administrator or lead physician engage with patients in their own clinic. Leadership rounding can occur on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis.

Employee engagement is imperative to a successful patient experience program. It is important to understand what drives employees and why they come to work each day. Consider conducting an employee engagement survey to better understand how staff members feel about their work environment. Communication, teamwork, safety, confidence in management and the ability to provide quality care are key topics to cover in an employee engagement survey.

You can also personally check in with your staff through leadership rounding to get a better understanding of what is working and what needs further attention. Listening with empathy to your employees is just as important as listening to your patients.

Studies show that less than half of the U. More engaged employees make for more satisfied patients. Service excellence is more than a friendly face. It requires a core set of standards that yield a framework for treating patients with courtesy and respect while offering the highest quality of care. Such training teaches staff how to effectively handle patient concerns in real time as well as how to respond in a way that demonstrates empathy to the patient's concerns.

Service excellence training will not prevent all service breakdowns, so it is also important to have a strong service recovery strategy. Service recovery can turn a disgruntled patient into someone who is happy and loyal to your practice. In the event that service recovery is needed, staff should be prepared to apologize and acknowledge the breakdown in service, listen to the patient's concerns and act quickly to fix the service issue. While all practice staff should be prepared to handle these types of situations, it is helpful to identify an individual, often a supervisor or practice manager, to lead service recovery efforts.

The strength of the relationship between a patient and their physician and other care providers significantly impacts the patient experience. A strong relationship is founded on effective communication. Initiate conversations with clinicians to understand how they are currently introducing the computer, working with patients on agenda setting and other aspects of the patient encounter to understand any challenges they are facing in effectively communicating with their patients.

Find avenues to maximize communication and peer training. Practice listening with empathy , teach-back and other methods to foster strong communication. REDE emphasizes creating a safe and supportive atmosphere as you establish the tone for the conversation with the patient. What is the expense associated with building a patient experience program? Staff time is needed to collate and analyze survey data, although for many practices the time needed is minimal.

If service excellence training is new to your practice, there will be some cost associated with staff time and training; however, consider incorporating the program into your new employee orientation to reduce future expense.

Many of the other patient experience program strategies, such as leadership rounding or a PFAC, tend to be inexpensive and can also offer valuable insight into ways to improve the practice, maintain an engaged patient population and build a referral base without a lot of data analysis. What are some common practice challenges and where do I start?

Here are some examples of initiatives to improve patient care: Improve lab results reporting: Consider using your patient portal to automatically send a note about results being available to view along with your nurse's contact information in case the patient has questions. This provides patients with access to information as well as to the care team.

Reduce patient frustration with wait time: Communicate delays to patients in a timely manner. Identify internal solutions to chronic bottlenecks and work with your team to address them. Some practices have a manager come out with coffee or vouchers when wait times are abnormally long. Reduce patient dissatisfaction with billing and insurance-related issues: It is unlikely that you will be able to eliminate all billing and insurance-related complaints, but training staff on basic insurance information and office billing practices can help them answer questions from patients.

If you are consistently receiving patient feedback that their bills are hard to read or understand, consider putting together a team to reconfigure the bill layout to be more patient-friendly. Implement pre-registration: Collecting important demographic and insurance information ahead of the patient's appointment can significantly expedite the check-in process and eliminate delays. Maximize in-basket management: Come up with a strategy to effectively manage patient messages coming through the in-basket and online patient portal to provide more timely responses to patients.

You may choose to repeat patient satisfaction surveys as a part of your ongoing program strategy. Many surveys use similar measures that you can trend over time. If you are working with a vendor such as Press Ganey to distribute and analyze your survey or using the free CG CAHPS outpatient satisfaction survey, you can submit your practice data to a database for benchmarking.

It is likely that you won't be able to quantify all parts of your patient experience program. Qualitative input can be just as valuable. Look for trends in the comments section of your patient survey. If you started a PFAC, ask how it's going. Is meeting attendance strong? Are patients engaged and happy to be participating? Are physicians and staff deriving value from the PFAC?

If your practice has recently undergone a change or initiated a project aimed at solving a particular problem, look at patient visit statistics, complaint data and referral patterns to assess impact. For example, patients may have been particularly dissatisfied with the communication about wait times in your practice, so you recently put a process in place where the care team updates the front desk when the physician starts to run behind.

That has allowed your front desk staff to let patients know about a delay at the time of check-in, which not only updates them immediately upon arrival, but also provides them with the opportunity to reschedule if they are not able to wait.

You can track patient complaints and survey comments or complete leadership rounding to gauge the impact of this new communication strategy from the patient perspective. Should I give group feedback to care team members other than the physician? It is surprising how many practices do not share feedback with their clinicians or teams.

By sharing information, you create an environment of continuous quality improvement to keep employees engaged. During team meetings, you can use the results and patient comments to identify opportunities for improvement and highlight practice and staff strengths.

What are some tips for approaching difficult conversations about satisfaction scores with clinicians? Reflecting patient comments back to individual clinicians can be a sensitive topic. Be sure to share positive as well as negative comments. When addressing negative feedback, it is important to give clinicians the tools they need to improve and to communicate efforts that are being made back to their patients.

For example, if patients are frustrated and unable to find a parking space, be sure clinicians know that appropriate administrators are addressing this. This allows clinicians to respond to patients' concerns. If patient feedback indicates their physician seems to be rushed and distracted, relay this feedback to the physician and explore what might be leading to this response. If you are comfortable facilitating education to enhance communication skills, great.

If not, there is tremendous value in simply exploring what clinicians think is the gold standard of communication in their practice. Ask them how they open and close visits. Collating the responses can benefit everyone in the group. Providing feedback generates discussion and helps identify strategies to improve the patient experience. Building a patient experience program can be a challenging process.

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