Hello everyone. I'm Rebecca Canino, Administrative Director for the Office of telemedicine for Johns Hopkins Medicine. I'm here today with our medical director for telemedicine. Dr. Brian Hasslefield. He's also an internist and pediatrician practicing primary care. Thanks for talking with me, Brian. Thanks for having me, Rebecca. Today I want you to talk about patient satisfaction. The multi-faceted approach to really making the patient experience of telemedicine the best it can be. Brian, when you're thinking about patient satisfaction, what are some of the ways that you approach the subject? Great. It's a great question. I think it's important to remember that obviously of all of our stakeholders, the patient is perhaps the most important. At the end of the day, how the patient experiences their care is what we all started to think about when we started entertaining, entering a career in medicine, so we put that up at the forefront. Telehealth is health as the tagline goes, and we need to ensure that we think about how patients experienced their telemedicine experience. A couple of different ways that we've approached it. Retrospective, prospective, larger datasets and small datasets direct to patient. We've made a lot of changes and how we deliver care through our virtual tools, and the ability to understand how those changes impact patient experience is really critical. Creating automated structures for sending out retrospective surveys about patient experience in their telemedicine visits has really been impactful to us to evaluate how some of our core changes in our video platform, in our outreach platforms, have impacted patient ability to consume and engage in our telemedicine modalities. At the same time, we need to understand what we're building for and where we're building towards, and patient voice needs to be front and center in that prospective planning, sending out large surveys to dedicated advisor groups in the patient's space about their future expectations, about what they want out of telemedicine going forward. But ultimately, large datasets can only give you so much, and having direct to patient and patient family communication modalities is critically important. At Hopkins, we maintain a robust patient family advisory set, patients and families across all of our care delivery entities, and hearing directly from those patients and family members is important to get that very personal one-on-one feedback about both experience, barriers as well as future expectations for our large health system. It's so important to get the individual patient voice. It's been fascinating looking at the patient satisfaction data and really looking critically at who's responding. In our data, overwhelmingly it's been the patients over 65, which is a great thing, and it's been primarily women, so I think it's interesting when you look at your data is to really make sure that you're hearing from the people who can't talk to you, so if you don't have a smart phone to get your telemedicine visit, you're not going to get that survey. It'll come in the mail. Are you illiterate? Do you have someone to help you fill out that survey? Coming up with ways to hear direct from the patient, I think proves pivotal. Do you have any thoughts around that? Yeah, absolutely. I think health equity has been an important component of our telemedicine care delivery modalities across Hopkins. That is as important or more important in feedback about experience and expectations. I think all patient-basing data is only as good as acknowledging who you're missing, and so figuring out mitigating strategies to address who's missing in the dataset is a critical component and why some of that direct to patient and small group engagement is so important across our care continuum. Brian, it's so interesting to me to get feedback from the patients about access. As we've just mentioned, who's responding and who's not. How pivotal is that data and how can we use that data? Well, obviously first and foremost, we need to be using the data to ensure that we're meeting the needs of our patients, but in addition to that expected use, we've found it really important to leverage the patient's voice in our public policy and advocacy efforts. In a subsequent course here, we'll be discussing the importance of engagement with local, state and federal government and regulatory bodies. The emotional, tangible aspect of a patient voice and a patient's story has been really critical in ensuring that what can be abstract is made very real, and in many places that's helpful. It's certainly helpful in the public policy space. That's fascinating. I can't wait to talk more about it. Thank you, Brian, for your time.
