There’s no question that digital patient rounding tools play a key role in improving patient satisfaction. The technology gives leaders insight into patient concerns and helps care teams step in early before issues escalate.
Indeed, at Prisma Health, CipherRounds helped drive a 35-point improvement in “Likely to Recommend” scores at their largest emergency department over two years.
But patient satisfaction is only part of the return.
Rounding tools are multi-purpose. Beyond patient satisfaction, they can boost staff engagement and improve the quality of rounding. The same features and functionalities can support nurse leaders, reduce burnout, and help close quality and safety gaps.
Here’s how organizations like yours are using digital rounding tools to extend value beyond satisfaction scores.
Support and retain staff
Healthcare organizations continue to face high staff turnover and burnout. One study found 55% of US healthcare workers intended to search for, interview for, or switch jobs in 2026, while 84% said they felt underappreciated at their current employer.
The problem isn’t going away and leadership has an opportunity to do more. By engaging employees early, before dissatisfaction builds, they can make attrition less inevitable.
What would it look like to catch employee issues early, instead of reacting later?
At one large, not-for-profit health system in the Midwest, leaders used their rounding tool to build a holistic engagement approach that brings together surveys, staff rounding, recognition, listening tools, and life-event resources.
With CipherRounds, leaders shifted to shorter, impactful conversations. They completed more than 31,000 staff rounds, engaging nearly 13,000 employees multiple times.
They asked staff members simple but effective questions: What do you love about your job? What would make your workday easier? What’s a small “pebble in your shoe” we can fix? What’s one thing we can do to support you today?
Here’s what happened:
- Employee satisfaction increased by 24%
- More than 900 moments of recognition and counting
- 40% more leaders acted on feedback
- Frequent rounding tied to higher retention
By giving leaders a consistent way to listen, act, and follow through, CipherRounds helped spot disengagement and respond before it led to turnover.
Drive consistent quality and safety
An estimated 2 million patients in the U.S. acquire healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). At one large nonprofit health system in Northern Virginia and the Washington, D.C. area, leaders set out to address this issue head-on.
The plan? To use their rounding tool to strengthen infection prevention efforts across five hospitals. The organization set a goal of improving compliance across key bundles for Foley catheters, central lines, and hand hygiene. This would also give teams better visibility into performance and opportunities for improvement.
Before adopting CipherRounds, nurse leaders and infection preventionists followed different scripts, which made it difficult and often confusing to analyze data, identify trends or understand why compliance rates differed.
Over two years, the health system reached or surpassed its system-wide 90% compliance goal across all three focus areas. In addition, the health system now shares results monthly, instead of annually or quarterly, giving teams more frequent access to performance trends and compliance gaps.
Connect the dots
What changes when patient experience, staff engagement, and care quality all run on the same platform? Improvements don’t happen in silos. Instead, organizations capture more value from every interaction, whether with staff or patients.
Here’s what it looks like in practice:
- Patient satisfaction issues are brought to light and resolved earlier, well before they show up in survey results
- Staff feedback leads to visible action, helping leaders recognize employee effort, increase trust, and reduce turnover
- Quality and safety behaviors are reinforced, making it easier to standardize best practices and reduce HAIs → amplifying a better patient experience
The more healthcare systems and hospitals can consolidate their rounding efforts and reduce complexity, the easier it becomes to improve operations today while staying ready for what comes next.
Looking to unlock more value from your rounding programs? Let’s connect!
