How HCA Creates Accountability with Follow Up Timeliness

Video Transcript

Kellie Paulsen, MSN, RN, NE-BC, Division Director of Patient Experience, HCA Healthcare Central/West Texas Division:

We have hundreds of people making callbacks, so it’s very big span of control. It’s individual unit leaders calling back, frontline leaders calling back patients that they discharged off their individual unit.

We really had to pick what we’re going to prioritize as our focus. We first prioritized calling back these patients timely. That’s the way we wow them. It’s the way we get a hold of them. It’s the way we get that question answered is by timely responsiveness.

We look really closely at our mean callback time. The second is whether we are we able to reach that patient and there is documentation about the nature of the issue. That is an indicator to us that we’re getting a hold of these patients and those are the two largest metrics.

We have a custom report that goes out to all of our executive team. We’re very into color coding. In the mean time is green. Less than four hours is our target, so if you’re greater than four hours on your mean callback time, you’re either yellow or red, depending on how far out of that spec it is. And nobody wants to be in the red. That gets everybody’s attention.

It’s a report that goes out with a monthly summary. Our leaders get weekly reports as well, but the executive team gets a monthly summary, and there’s some innate competitiveness, and that’s where the drive to really get consistency across all of our facilities has come from. We’ve had really feel like we’ve been able to have a lot of traction from that red, yellow, green report.