“If communication isn’t part of your quality improvement, it should be.”

Learn 20 different ways communication can help in QI. In 10 minutes!

Whether you’re in healthcare, public health, industry, or academia, quality improvement is part of your professional picture in one form or another. If you want to reach your quality improvement goals, I’ve got good news. Communication can be your secret advantage. More good news? In the next 10 minutes, I’m going to give you 20 different ways communication can help in QI. So you’ve no excuse for not making communication a bigger part of your quality improvement activities.

Hi everybody. This is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, ranked number 20 in the Top 100 Podcasts in Social Sciences. Giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement, experience, and satisfaction since 2017. I’m Dr. Anne -Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator with expertise in communication and education. I’m here to dig into some of what we might take for granted about communication in our professional lives. If you want to strengthen the work you can do in your professional sphere, this is a place for you. Because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make.

I want to start by sending out love to the QI experts out there ’cause you’ve got a tough job. I’ve been directly involved in quality initiatives, and as a consultant, all of my clients are also involved in quality initiatives. And way back in education and higher ed in my past, you might know that those sectors have been subjected to near-constant reform. And dealing with those reforms, thinking critically about those reforms was a significant part of my education at Penn. So I’m drawing on that too, and what I’ve learned from clients and from QI experts. Whoever you are, what kind of organization you work in, I’m hoping this is going to be helpful.

Now the examples are going to be from the health sector, but I’m trying to choose an approach that will apply across contexts because lots of different folks are listening to the show right now, so I’m hoping you’ll see possibilities for your situation reflected here.

When you hear the term “quality,” I wonder what it makes you think, because it can encompass so much. And yes, some of those initial thoughts you had might not have been particularly warm or fuzzy ones. That’s also me. So if that’s you, I still hope what I’m sharing today can be helpful. I’m thinking about QI as encompassing all sorts of activities that promote evidence-based practice and person–centered principles to improve quality, improve outcomes, and ideally lower costs.

Everyone’s collecting data to see where they need to improve, and then looking for ways to improve. That’s why communication is so valuable and so helpful. Because whether you’re collecting data to see where improvement is needed, or you’re looking for ways to improve once you know where you’ve got to work on, or both, communication is your friend.

Communication can help with quality improvement in two distinct ways. One, as something to measure. And two, as an action item on nearly anything that you do measure. So I’m going to give you 10 examples for each. Get your thinking, maybe spark some ideas and provide encouragement. As a consultant, a lot of what I get asked to do is capacity building for clients, to help them reach their goals. And I was talking with a former healthcare administrator about this. And he said the quote that’s the title of this episode, if communication isn’t part of your quality improvement, it should be. So I thought there’s a great placeto start this miniseries.

All right, first, when communication is the thing you’re measuring. Here’s 10 different ways you could measure communication. Just to get your thinking, I’ll follow up with some tips as well. Now, most of these have to do with patient/provider communication, but you could think about this as like employee -manager communication as well. Okay, here we go, communication quality metrics:

1. Rate of patients reporting that their provider actively listened to their concerns.
2. Rate of patients who feel their provider explained their condition and treatment options clearly.
3. Rate of patients stating they were able to ask questions and received satisfactory answers.
4. Percent of patients reporting that their provider was sensitive to their cultural background and needs.
5. Percent of patients who received not just written information about their care plan but received this in multiple ways. That’s called multimodality. If you want to geek out on it, we have a podcast episode, I’ll link to it in the notes.
6. Number of patients with limited English proficiency, for whom the consent discussion involved an interpreter This one’s from a great study of QI measures and health literacy that I’ll link to in the notes. And if you’re thinking about the new quality requirements around health related social needs screenings, you could modify this for that as well.
7. Observed instances of providers using open-ended questions to encourage patient input.
8. Rate of providers demonstrating empathy and respect towards patients through their communication.
9. Proportion of interactions where providers actively summarize key points with the patient.
10. Reported instances of community members’ involvement in identifying needs, and/or designing and implementing interventions, and/or evaluating effectiveness

Okay, a couple of tips for those quality measures. Context matters, right? So any of those metrics you want to tailor to your setting and to your patient population. Also, keep in mind things like the Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services standards, and organizational health literacy from Healthy People 2030, I’m going to go ahead and link to them in the notes as well.

So these are some ways to think about measuring communication, get some meaningful data. And then of course, we need to act.

So that’s the second way communication can really be helpful to you in quality improvement. Regardless of whether you’re measuring communication or something else! Communication can help you improve on any process metric.

How do you do this? Well, here’s 10 resources exclusively from us here at HCP.

1. Number one, a podcast episode I wanna draw your attention to called Why Focus on Communication? This episode helps us articulate to ourselves and others why communication is a smart thing to focus on when we really want to make things happen.
2. Two,the podcast 5 reasons why communication should be part of any health equity strategy. This is about communication as a lever for health equity, integrating it into organizational cultures, missions, and strategic plans.
3. Number three, the episode 11 updated health literacy tips. Yep, just like it says. 11 updated tips to help you support individual and organizational health literacy. Big quality improvement issue there, health literacy is.
4. Number four, we have a course, Foundations of Equitable Patient Education. This course reveals barriers that people often miss to improving access and quality of care and services. And then how you can address those barriers. Right on healthcommunicationpartners.com. Click on courses.
5. Number five, Dr. Bradley Block has a podcast and he stopped by our show to talk about efficiency in patient communication. Check out that episode.
6. Number six, we have an episode called A New Way to Say the Same Thing. In that episode, I tell you 10 different ways you can express a complex idea so you can have different approaches for different patients.
7. Number seven, “Any conversation about care is also a conversation about culture.” That’s a quote from a physician. That’s the title of a podcast episode we did about learning how to reflect on your cross–cultural communication.
8. And if you’d like an example of a physician doing just that, Number eight is an episode from Dr. Raj Sundar on considering cultural context during patient communication. And there’s two parts to that one. Definitely check it out.
9. Number nine is an episode called Collaborating? Here is four hints to help things go smoothly, because we know if we want to get work done on big problems, it means collaborating. So I share tips that I’ve given to clients.
10. And finally, number 10, contact me. Visit healthcommunicationpartners.com and click on contact. Or if you’re on LinkedIn, connect with me and we can message there.

This has been 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. Audio engineering and music from Joe Liebel, additional music from Alexis Rounds.