Patient Care is at the Center of Everything We Do

When you’re a patient at Inspira Health, you’re expecting great medical care. Of course, meeting that expectation is of the utmost importance to our physicians, nurses and staff. But we want to go beyond that. In fact, one of the pillars of our culture is for patients to have a “Wow” experience whether they visit one of our urgent care centers, get physical therapy for a time or are admitted to the hospital.

To ensure that we continue to deliver on that promise, we strive to facilitate two-way communication between our physicians, nurses and staff and our patients. For about two decades, we’ve been committed to surveying our patients to gather feedback on the types of experiences they have at Inspira. We look closely at responses, address issues that arise from time to time, and make adjustments to ensure that our patients are always at the center of everything we do. In the last several years, we have expanded the survey tool to be used at our imaging sites, urgent care centers and physician offices.

That patient feedback work is linked to another function we’ve been working closely on—becoming a high reliability organization (HRO).

We began our HRO transformation by establishing a teamwork based safety culture, which included educating and training in high reliability tools and best practices to over 6,000 Inspira employees and physicians; ensuring everyone is aware of safety issues through Daily Safety Briefings; leader rounding, in which leadership engages with staff about unit-specific concerns; and creating more than 200 trained, unit-based safety coaches to champion the success and fundamentals of high reliability.

By combining these behaviors and tools every day across every part of Inspira, we are working toward eliminating preventable patient harm.

Our transformation into an HRO has resulted in an 80 percent decrease in preventable patient harm. Our commitment to patients and success has not gone unnoticed. Press Ganey, a leading organization in patient experience measurement and performance improvement solutions, presented Inspira Health the Success Story Award® for our HRO transformation and the Pinnacle Award for patient satisfaction scores at our outpatient rehabilitation sites for physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy.

We are incredibly proud of the work we have done to date to prevent serious harm, gather patient feedback and deliver a Wow experience. And as we look into the next decade, we remain committed to this promise and our mission of providing high-quality health services that improve the lives of all we serve.