Putting Trust at the Center of Healthcare Transformation: Press Ganey CEO, Pat Ryan

Through its work with more than 41,000 healthcare facilities and
the industry’s largest database of patient feedback, Press Ganey
gives organizations the data and insights they need to put the
human experience at the center of healthcare.

Since it was founded nearly 40 years ago by Professors Press and
Ganey at the University of Notre Dame, the company has built a
reputation for being the prominent source of patient feedback,
but it hasn’t stopped there. Its solutions capture the voice of
the patient, physician, nurse, and employee to keep healthcare
focused on people by enabling organizations to address safety,
clinical excellence, patient and member experience, and workforce
engagement.

Pat Ryan became CEO of Press Ganey in 2012 after more than 30
years working with healthcare leaders and providers, including a
dozen years as a Press Ganey client. Pat has served on several
health system boards and has worked throughout his career to
improve the quality and safety of care while lowering cost and
achieving caregiver resilience to deliver truly patient-centered
experience.

In this episode of Healthcare is Hard, Pat spoke with Keith
Figlioli about the increasing focus on human experience in
healthcare transformation. Drawing knowledge from his career and
from Press Ganey’s unrivaled understanding of patients and the
professionals who serve them, Pat shared his perspective on
topics including:



The link between patient experience and financial
success. Pat shared what he says is a little known fact –
that health systems across the country with the highest margins
also have the highest patient scores. He talked about how the
two are linked and how value leads to long term community
loyalty. He cited his time on the board of Beth Israel
Deaconess Medical Center where they looked at patient data
first and financial data second. He says health systems today
need a comprehensive view that also includes safety and
employee engagement data in order to identify opportunities for
improvement.


Redesigning healthcare from the outside in. Any consumer
business would start with the needs of the customer first and
work backwards to design systems that add value. But healthcare
wasn’t created that way and was built from the inside-out. Pat
discussed the need for healthcare organizations to continue the
long journey of recognizing that consumers comes first, and
talked about how workforce engagement will be an important
component of that as the industry evolves.


The trust factor. Pat describes how organization can map
trust in order to understand where it breaks down by
identifying friction points within the customer journey. He
talks about how important it is to build and maintain trust in
all relationships – not just a patient or family’s trust in an
organization, but also nurse, clinician and employee trust in
their organization and leadership. He mentions how important
this is for payer organizations that are especially susceptible
to unfair or inaccurate perceptions.

 Opportunities for innovation. When discussing
areas where healthcare organizations can improve, and where
innovators in the space can help them, Pat’s focus during this
conversation was mostly on two issues – home care and the shift
towards value. He says figuring out how to care for more people
at home is going to be critical and sees opportunity around
redesigning the healthcare workforce for the gig economy. He also
talks about how slow the movement to value-based contracts has
been and how a major break in the system may finally force
congress to act if adoption doesn’t pick up.



To hear Keith and Pat discuss these topics and more, listen to
this episode of Healthcare is Hard: A Podcast for Insiders.