Facility: Cobb Hospital

Job Summary:

The Director of Patient Experience is the WellStar Health System champion dedicated to creating a world-class culture of excellence in patient experience. This position reports to the Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer.
The Director of Patient Experience oversees planning and execution of hospital-wide patient experience and service excellence programs. He/she ensures collaboration and coordination of the following efforts for the campus:
Inpatient Satisfaction
Outpatient Satisfaction (including oversight of 30+ HODs)
Emergency Department Satisfaction
Ambulatory Surgery Satisfaction
This leader will work collaboratively with physicians, nursing staff, and ancillary/support staff on improving the patient experience.
This individual partner's and/or collaborates with leaders regarding quality of discharge calls provided by team members and the discharge call center.
This leader works closely with the medical staff to ensure a thorough understanding and commitment to continuous improvement in the patient experience. In this position, the Director collaborates with hospital leadership on a strategic vision of service excellence that will be cascaded down to all staff members; communicates progress on service excellence initiatives to key team members, including executives, department, and key Committees. In addition, he/she leads service excellence councils and committees; oversees a data driven program collecting, tracking, and analyzing patient experience trends for optimizing service outcomes.
The Director of Patient Experience coaches Hospital employees to maximize the use of customer service tools and programs for an enhanced patient experience. Maintains all budgetary and human resource activities for the department. Ensures compliance to regulatory requirements for responses to patients' grievances.
In addition to responsibility for patient experience, this leader will:
Supervise a team of customer service representatives located throughout the hospital
Lead the customer relations team and provide oversight to the formal patient grievance process
Provide support to the hospital auxiliary and volunteers

Core Responsibilities and Essential Functions:

Patient Experience - Leads Cobb Hospital's patient experience efforts to achieve system targeted goals and objectives.
* Leads the Patient Experience Councils in the development of patient experience service initiatives and the implementation and establishment of Hospital-wide patient satisfaction programs.
* Ensures the integration and alignment of patient experience strategies with teams across the hospital.
* In collaboration with hospital leadership, leads hospital-wide cultural transformation with patient experience at the center to ensure all touch points meet and exceed patients needs.
* Researches, develops, and oversees the implementation of strategic plans, policies, and standards that promote the patient/customer experience.
* Responsible for oversight of Press Ganey patient satisfaction database, including patient survey questions, related annual budgeting, and running of reports as needed.
* Provides guidance regarding patient experience data collection, tracking, distribution, and communication.
* Drives analytics to measure patient experience strategic goals.
* Identifies areas for improvement, using Press Ganey and HCAHPS patient experience data on an ongoing basis.
* Leads in the development and implementation of strategies to close identified service gaps. j. Focuses the hospital on reforming management and employee behavior and retooling operational processes to better align them with patient needs.
* Leads efforts to hardwire management and employee practices to ensure exceptional service.
* Create, deploy and monitor innovative improvement techniques. (i.e. d/c phone calls, rounding, secret shoppers, service recovery, etc.).
* Serves as liaison with corporate leaders and patient experience staff.

Customer Service Representatives Provides leadership to the Customer Service Representative (CSR) team along with the Manager.
* Provides leadership, along with the Manager, to the CSR team located in the Emergency Department, Surgical Services, CVOR and wherever may be defined in the future.
* Provides all coaching and human resources oversight to this team.
* Ensures adequate staffing.
* Promotes growth and employee retention.
* Performs team member evaluations and payroll functions.
* Ensures team creates a positive and professional atmosphere.
* Provide future leadership needs as defined.

Service Coaching Leader Provide campus leadership for service coaching efforts.
* Ensure that Service Coaching efforts are maximized for the campus.
* Define the needs for: Emergency Department, Ambulatory Surgery and Inpatient areas.
* Provide Service Coaching to areas not currently supported by the system Service Coaches.
* Provide support for operational departmental leadership development and implementing plans for improvement.
* Provide future leadership needs as defined.

Patient concern process - collaborates with Patient Relations team.
* Review patient concerns to develop actions to achieve improvement in areas frequently identified.
* Continuously monitors Joint Commission and CMS regulations regarding Formal Grievances and ensures the WellStar policies and procedures are aligned
* Monitors timeliness of response to formal grievances and monitors responses to ensure alignment with policies and procedures
* Creates, deploys and evaluates service recovery training for leadership and team members. e. Provide future leadership needs as defined.
* Leads the patient/family Advisory Group

Reward and Recognition
* Provides campus administrative oversight for Shining Star Award and other campus reward and recognition programs.

Administrative Responsibilities
* Develops and maintains the budget and achieves identified productivity goals.
* Submits reports regularly and as requested on patient satisfactions trends and campus-wide efforts
* Collaborates with service excellence teams across WellStar Health System to achieve organizational alignment and economies of scale for system initiatives.

Performs other duties as assigned

Complies with all WellStar Health System policies, standards of work, and code of conduct.

Required Minimum Education:

Bachelor's Degree in Healthcare Administration, Business Administration or clinical
field of study.
Required and
Master's Degree Preferred

Required Minimum License(s) and Certification(s):

All certifications are required upon hire unless otherwise stated.

Required Minimum Experience:

Minimum 5 years to seven (7) years of service excellence/patient experience with 5 years of progressive leadership experience Required and

Minimum 2 years with direct management of individuals or teams. Required and
Experience in HCAHPS/CAHPS, CMS regulations, value-based purchasing Preferred and
Ability to influence positive and sustainable change in an urgent and fast-paced environment Required

Required Minimum Skills:

Skilled communicator and strong cultural influence.
Strong organizational skills and experience in assessing processes and implementing organizational improvements.
Successful track record in leading a department-wide or house-wide patient experience program.
Proven track record demonstrating the ability to influence and advise to effect positive change, especially for those who do not directly report.
Strong customer service, negotiating and crisis management skills, as well as communication and publication/presentation skills.
Possess analytical skills for interpretation of patient surveys, reports and trends.
Proficient in MS Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
Familiarity with statistics and statistical packages (Winstat and SPSS) preferred.
Ability to work in a fast- paced team environment.