ASCs face several challenges headed into 2024, one being a fast-paced and ever-changing healthcare landscape that consistently keeps practices and administrators on their toes.
Emma Gimmel, BSN, RN, director of nursing at Manhattan Endoscopy in New York City, told Becker's how ongoing changes in the healthcare industry force her team to stay ahead of patient reviews and patient expectations at all times.
Ms. Gimmel: In healthcare, the trend I keep in the forefront is the ongoing change menace. There are too many moving parts, and mostly moving at fast speed. Most everything is changing, sometimes simultaneously, and it seems as a common denominator across industries. This requires us to review and reassess our strategies with more frequency. To remain relevant in our practices, it is best to keep an eye on changes on an ongoing basis. It helps to keep an engineered mechanism to alert us of changes. Our communication venues and information sources exert a great deal of influence across lines since information is shared at lighting speed. Our patient experience, previously known as customer satisfaction, is influenced by impressive external forces creating expectations even before our initial interactions. If we do not take the opportunity and attempt to establish expectations starting with the very first interaction, our clients arrive with their external derived expectations which may not favor the services we provide. Failed expectations are real and at times unfair to our delivery. Other good sources of information we have to watch are the patients’ comments penned in the surveys, which may offer changing trends in impressions, variables in our services, or opportunities we can review or find a way to reestablish expectations to align with our intended delivery and services.