Next Generation Patient Experience: Session Recap: Key Takeaways from Rick Evans at NGPX 2025

2025, NGPX. KEYNOTE_Engaging a New Generation of Team Members in Patient Experience Improvement and Best Practices

Announcer: Can y'all hear me? Here we go. So it is my pleasure now to welcome to the stage someone again when I was just getting into this work. I started following Rick Evans, who is the Senior Vice President and Chief Experience Officer for New York Presbyterian Hospital. Rick if you have followed him, you have written many pieces on this work.

You have had a wonderful voice. You have championed this work on the large scale, and we are in for a treat now. So welcome to the stage, Rick. Thank you so much.

Rick Evans, SVP and Chief Experience Officer Senior Vice President and Chief Experience Officer, New York-Presbyterian Hospital: Thank you. And Amy Sils, where'd you go? So good to see you on stage, so it's great to be with you all this morning. The thought that I woke up with this morning, this conference is called Next Generation Patient Experience. That's what I wanna talk about for the next 20 minutes. Different versions of what, think about the phrase next generation.

So what I wanna share first is actually something we started looking at because we realized we had a problem and we've had enormous fun solving it. This, everything I'm gonna show you is fun and you can go home and you can do this in your own organization. It's really looking at how we reach. The employees, the frontline of our organization.

And you'll hear you heard a little bit in my introduction. I'll talk a little bit at the end. I'm one of the not the next generation of patient experience. I'm one of the old fogies of patient experience. And so I'm, I was having an old fogey moment here. So we, do anyone in the room do a patient experience training of some sort in your organization?

Do you do that? Of course. Okay. And we were using all of the usual venues. We had new employee orientation after COVID that became virtual, which meant it was even less effective than it ever was before. We had some virtual onboarding touch bases with new employees. Okay. That was a little something that happened after hire.

We had an annual hospital training. Any of you had that? I just completed mine. I found ways to shortcut and get right to the quiz part so I don't actually have to review anything. But that's the typical experience of annual hospital training. Am I wrong? How quickly can I get through this race and pass and all the things I have to learn?

And we did have, we do have an organization, a very robust tiered huddle system, and that was something that was actually working. You would talk to the front line and over the course of a morning. It would cascade through huddles all the way up to senior management. So it wasn't all dismal, but a lot of it was pretty stale and dry.

The other thing that was happening, and this was the old fogey moment, was our workforce was changing. Are you seeing this in your organizations as well? So we were seeing a next generation, a new generation coming into our organization. We had more people than we'd ever had before who were new to our hospital after COVID.

Right now, by the way, our turnover rate is less than 3%. We couldn't be happier with that. That's phenomenal. But that also means we've had phenomenal shifts in the people who work in our organization. So new to New York Presbyterian, new to profession. Any of you have that as well in your organizations?

Nurses who are hitting the floor? Who basically are right outta school, right? And we have a whole new generation of people in our workforce. Now, I'm getting this lesson at work. I'm also getting it at home. I have a 14-year-old son, all the gray hair in my head, by the way. Talked about gratitude. I'm the luckiest guy on earth to be this kid's dad, but he would rather text me from the next room.

Then actually come in and talk to me. I get more emotion from him, from his emojis. He, I'm in the age now where the hug is a little sideways thing, but I'll get emojis from him right now. That's a silly way to talk about it. But we have a new generation of people in our workforce.

Who are really good at communicating on their devices, but not as good or confident in communicating in personal. So think about that, and we were thinking about that. Again, think we force our staff to use their devices, right? They're charting on their device, their communicating with each other on their device, but sometimes they're doing that at the bed, while a patient is sitting right there and they don't always know.

How would they don't what? They weren't taught that in nursing school or in medical school. How would they know how to bridge that gap? We need the tech, I'm not putting tech down, but we need the ability to cross that, those last 10 yards to the actual patient in front of us. So we had this generational change.

Actually, the average age of our nurses is going down. There's really good news in a lot of this, but there was also an embedded challenge. So we thought, how are we gonna do this? So here's a couple things we did that are enormously fun. We're a magnet hospital, and so we have a lot of shared governance structures.

What does shared governance mean? Shared governance is a fancy word for the people who are doing the work. Need to have a voice in the work, right? They need to be at the table. And so originally for patient experience. We formed as part of our magnet structure, patient experience councils. There were quality councils, there were staff councils on units that sort of governed their units, but we didn't have a patient experience element for that.

And so we asked for volunteers. And guess what? We the photo on the right was the beginning of this particular council. It's a small conference room on Greenberg 14. There might be 25 people. That council has gotten so large that it's now on the left. We had to move it across the street to our David H.

Koch Center where you can get 40 or 50 people in a room. They meet once a month and they talk about patient experience. Amy was talking about data, so they have the data on the nursing domain or our process measures on bedside shift report or our patient's feedback on whether they were rounded on regularly.

They have that data. They know about our best practices and when they come together, they talk about how that stuff, a lot of the stuff that my team and I are putting out into the organization, how that stuff actually comes to life in the workflow. One of the reasons why patient experience leaders sometimes fail or struggle.

We have great ideas, but we can't get 'em in the workflow. If you can't have it happening, right where people work, you have a poster or you have a slide deck, but you don't have change, and just like when you send something to your patient and family advisory Council, what comes back is always better. Am I wrong?

You give it to the people you're working for. They give you feedback. I've never seen something come back from A-P-F-A-C that they didn't make better. Same here. They have transformed our, the way we think about bedside best practices. I'll give you an example of how many of you working on bedside shift report.

Okay. Okay. Whole room all the way to the back. Great. I thought that was the holy grail, one of the holy grails of patient experience. I wondered if I would retire and actually see bedside shift report. What this group taught us about were the barriers to bedside shift report. Let me give you a silly example.

They told us, Rick, we wanna do bedside shift report. We have double beded rooms. I'm really worried about this other patient hearing things that they shouldn't be hearing. How do we get over that? Or what about the patient that doesn't want any bedside shift report, but we still need to do something for the sake.

They told us about the barriers that they were experiencing, and together we found ways to overcome those barriers. I'll tell you right now, our bedside shift report, self patient reported bedside shift report. In other words, the percent of patients who said Yes, that happened, we're at 85% of our patients saying bedside shift report happens.

I think that's pretty damn good. I'd like 90, but 85% that number is happening because these people really told us what was going on at the front line. So if you don't have a staff or PX council, go make one. Go make one. And by the way, the next generation of patient experience leaders and staff at my organization are sitting in that room.

I met with one of 'em the other day. See that? That nurse with the white scrub down in the middle of that room on the right, that's a future CXO. He doesn't even know it yet. Don't tell him I gotta work with him. But that's a future CXOI thought that the other day when I was talking to him. So that's one fun idea.

Another fun idea and you're gonna think, Rick, this is so low tech. We had the council suggested we start skills fairs. Now I'm from New York. One of the things New Yorkers do really is we roll our eyes at things. So they said, Rick, we wanna have a fair in one of our big conference rooms, and in this fair we want people to come to the fair.

It and we're gonna have different stations with our best practices. We're gonna have a bed with a patient in it, and we're gonna practice bedside shift report. We're gonna have a booth on care rounds. We're gonna have a booth on, all of our various how to do medication education. We have best practices for that.

We use peak care, our television system in a lot of our patient interactions. Now, we're gonna have a station where people can learn how to use peak care. I thought, oh God you're gonna have a fair, we're gonna have a party. And I wasn't, I said, yes, 'cause it came from the front line. I wanted to support them, but I was a little skeptical.

I really was. Then I went to the first fair, blew my mind. The room was full people. I was worried about that. Who's gonna come to a fair, our units. Cycled their staff through it. They went down for 20 minutes, they went to the fair, they came back upstairs. So we cycled. We didn't destroy staffing. We sent especially our newer team members who might not have had a great orientation experience and may not even been aware of these things.

These have been off the chart Success. Every single one of them is fun. Hundreds of people, lots of energy. And the councils are driving it. They're the ones who are driving the content. And each one has a theme. There have been cowboy themes. You could see there are a couple other themes. Again, very simple, very low tech, but it's people interacting with each other, learning how to do things.

And by the way, my sense is, again, being an old fogey. But my sense is, again, that our newer generation of staff craves being in a room and having an experience like that. They love it, they remember it. That's probably more effective at getting us to 85% on bedside shift report than any slide or any huddle message I've sent out in my organization.

And it's a hell of a lot of fun, hell of a lot of fun. Another thing we've done with our training is we've made it scenario based. We don't have any more slide decks. You review them, you take a quiz. We have trainings where our team members can go in and they have to choose. You've heard gamification, you've heard those things.

This is not particularly groundbreaking, but it takes people through a scenario and they have to choose a course of action. This first training we did was what we call citizenship behaviors. I'll give you a silly example. One of the first things that we, in this this scenario based training is when you get to the front door of the hospital, what do you keep and what do you put away?

Your earbuds come out. 'cause in New York, you need earbuds to survive the subway ride, right? But they come out, your phone goes in your pocket, your ID goes on. You're looking around to help somebody. Again, this is not rocket science, but it's making you think about how you act in a very various scenarios.

We have trouble getting people to complete training. This training got to 90% in a month and a half 'cause people were having fun and they were thinking about it and they were learning. So what's coming up next in, in this realm? So one of the things we're working on now. Is a scenario based training where we can take people through at the front line, how to communicate, how to bridge the gap between your device and the bedside.

And again, thinking about scenarios. So that's something that's in development and we wanna run it out roll it out this coming year. The other thing we started just literally last week, I mentioned those PX councils. We have 11 hospitals. So we have 11, actually more than that patient experience councils.

Each of those councils have co-chairs, staff, co-chairs. They're not directors or managers. They are frontline nurses or pharmacists. These are frontline people, leading councils. You know what those people are. Those are future, actually, not future. They are leaders in our organization and we need to support them and help them see themselves as leaders.

Again, this conference is called Next Generation. Like Amy. I'm contemplating my next chapter at some point in the next couple years. I wanna spend more time with my kid before I lose him in college, and also can't wait for that.

But we've got, we got the chairs together and we've told them you are leaders. You may not have thought about this before, but we're gonna help you develop as a leader. So we're working with them. We're bringing them into our strategy. So when we're the PX team in the room thinking about what we're gonna do, we're bringing them in to those meetings so they can be part of that.

They can be in on the development of the strategy and understand it at a more deep level. We're helping them think about how they actually lead their group. Teaching them some of the leadership skills. I believe what we're creating here are maybe future CXOs, but future patient care directors, future quality improvement leaders.

We see this as a pipeline now, not only for px, but for our entire leadership for our organization. Another thing we're doing is we're gonna have an annual conference for all the councils. With 11 councils, we probably have 200, almost 300 people. We're gonna have a next Gen PX conference at N at NYP and bring these people together.

And again, that drives change on the units. That means you've got 300 champions who actually understand what we're trying to accomplish out in the organization, and that can really help us go forward with our patient experience surveying capabilities, getting better and better. We now have the ability to do pulsing frontline surveys of our workers.

We just did a pulse survey on care rounds and bedside shift report to understand again, more about what that frontline is thinking. And basically any patient experience survey vendor now can help you with those tools and we can build them, send them, get a quick feedback, and we can move on. We can actually evolve our strategy.

So we're gonna do that. And then I already mentioned. Experience and scenario training that we're putting together now. I hope, again, nothing I just shared with you is groundbreaking. It's simple, but it's fun and it helps to mobilize the people that we need to be involved in our work. So I wanted to end this morning listening to Jen, listening to Amy, listening to Chrissy yesterday.

So I was thinking back on, on my own career a little bit. So I started in the late nineties too, again when dinosaurs roamed the earth. My first job as a brandly, newly minted VP in a health system, I had a, I have a theology degree, studied to be a priest, take me out for drinks. I'll tell you all about it.

But here I am a healthcare leader with a theology training, and my CEO says, Rick, we have these. Not so great. Press Ganey results. Can you fix them? So I thought, what do you want me to do? Pray for good results. And I actually do pray for good results. Some days. Use all your skills. I have those skills. I know how to pray.

But back then, and this is the message I'd like to leave with you personally. Back then there was nothing. There were surveys and a bunch of people trying to figure it out. What inspires me, what I was grateful for about being in this room today is I look out in this room, I see some wonderful old friends.

Longtime friends, not old friends, but I see tons of new faces that inspires me. The next generation is literally looking at me right now, and that's what we need. And if you want to act with confidence, let me tell you what has changed in 30 years. We have a body of knowledge about patient experience.

Listen to what Amy just shared, the years of experience and insight into just 20 minutes, and you're gonna hear that again and again. We have a body of knowledge. This isn't fluff. There's evidence, there's literature, there's data. We're not talking about garbage. We're talking about something that is well documented, right?

We have domain expertise. I'm A CXO. I know what I'm talking about because I've done it for decades and I bring all of that knowledge and that evidence to the table. I'm not talking fluff. I'm talking data. I'm talking return on investment. I'm talking evidence-based, best practices, not something, somebody went to a conference and it's bright and shiny.

Now let's have the whole organization do that. I keep my organization focused on the right things because I am an expert in patient experience. So are you, and part of being that next generation part of keeping things going needed more than ever in a world where incivility is growing, in a world where our budgets are being cut Medicaid is on the chopping block.

It's never been tougher, I think, than in some ways this moment is harder than COVID. But you have, we have domain expertise walk into rooms knowing that you bring that to the table. And the other thing is we have a community, we, I was talking about this with somebody yesterday. Patient experience is not proprietary, right?

We all own it. Am I right? So we have domain expertise and we have each other. So if you wanna make that impact when you walk into the room, you are the bo, you're the boss of patient experience. You're the knowledge in that room that will help people focus on the right things. There are quality experts in the room.

There are finance experts in the room. There are all kinds of other experts, but you are the PX experts and you bring that to the table. So I hope this was a little fun. Hope it I idea or two that you could take home and it's great to be with you today. Thank you very much.