Packard, Jennifer

Engaging employees in providing exemplary patient experience has been challenging for healthcare leaders in recent years given the pressures of the regulatory environment, increases in staff burnout and rising patient expectations. Amid these challenges, addressing patient experience remains a top priority for healthcare organizations. A novel intervention has been applied at Mayo Clinic with the goal of improving both employee engagement and patient experience. Previous efforts to teach service excellence involved customer service trainings, sometimes purchased through outside vendors. This new initiative is based on our organizational culture and values, input from our employees and patients, and considers the changing needs of a contemporary healthcare workforce. It leverages management practices shown to boost an employee's sense of equity, achievement, and camaraderie. It also highlights staff motivation to do their best work by involving them in conversations about the essential ingredients that make up both exceptional employee and patient experiences.

As of May 13, 2020, the number of confirmed SARS-CoV-2 (novel corona virus, COVID-19) infections has risen to 4 300 000 worldwide, with over 1 300 000 confirmed cases in the United States. Various prediction models of spread indicate more hospitalization, increased ventilator use, and the shifting of medical resources to most efficiently serve the patient’s needs. Additionally, mitigation strategies such as monitoring for symptoms, social distancing, safer at home, and the wearing of masks caused our institution to implement significant operational changes to our usual practice. This included screening patients and staff for symptoms, rescheduling routine medical visits, postponing procedures, converting face-to-face visits to telephone or video visits, and changing visitor visit policies. In this article, we describe the various ways we deployed empathic communication messaging and resources across the institution during the COVID-19 pandemic.