The patient experience at the core of the Institut Mutualiste Montsouris
The Institut Mutualiste Montsouris, a health establishment located in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, had more than 46,000 hospital stays and 480 beds in 2022. Through its five main areas of care (cardiovascular, oncology, functional pathologies, mother and child, and psychiatry), the Institute works tirelessly to put the patient experience at the heart of its strategic priorities. The IMM has recently joined Shared Patient eXperience as an institutional member.
Setting up a steering committee in 2018
The creation of a Steering Committee in 2018 was the first major initiative to improve the patient experience at the IMM. Since its creation, the committee has been involved in the identification of actions as well as their deployment. A sub-committee on integrative medicine and complementary care was then set up from the first one and expanded.
Numerous one-off actions have also supported the deployment of the PX over the years, even if the COVID period obviously slowed down experimentation: the organisation of a Patient Experience Day in June 2019 (another one is planned for the end of 2023), the training of professionals in patient experience and the setting up of surveys on various subjects.
Nathalie Bass, who oversees patient experience projects at the IMM, says that she and her team are trying to include a “patient experience” component in all the institutional projects they are entrusted with, despite the difficulties they sometimes encounter as this process is gradually unfolding.
A positive evaluation of patient care
The patient satisfaction indicators currently in place are generally good.
“The reception is excellent everywhere, from the entrance to the building, to the secretariat of the departments, to the dedicated departments and operating theatres, well done! Everyone I have interacted with has been friendly, attentive, and very nice.”
“This facility is in the future! Fantastic!”
The IMM employs a variety of methods to gather patient feedback, including:
- e-Satis (national system for the continuous measurement of patient satisfaction and experience managed by the HAS): based on the verbatim feedback from e-Satis, the IMM has set up a partnership with the company EntendsMoi, which uses automatic language processing to feed an IMM platform with several dashboards.
- Sending automatic e-mails to collect patients’ opinions on Google (in partnership with Merci Docteur).
- Internal satisfaction questionnaires (Maternity, Outpatient, MCO, Psychiatry)
- A form available to patients: “Patients speak out
- Collection of complaints and claims
- Direct interviews
- Quantitative and qualitative questionnaires sent to a panel of patients on different subjects (e.g.: questionnaire for imaging, questionnaire on physical activity and sport in the bariatric course, etc.)
- Focus groups with patients in person
- Communication campaigns with patients
An impact that is still difficult to measure
Although many tools have been put in place to measure the patient experience internally, the Institut Mutualiste Montsouris, like most French health establishments, is also facing a shortage of staff after 2.5 years of COVID. Although professionals are much more interested in the subject than they were a year ago, their mobilisation remains complicated.
As Nathalie Bass points out, measuring the patient experience is a long-term process: “It is very difficult today to measure a direct and tangible impact. Today, between 2019 and now, I am measuring awareness, interest in the subject among professionals, and adherence, but the operational results – particularly in organisations – are not yet visible with this criterion.”
Integrating the patient experience approach in a systematic way
Although it is still too early to draw conclusions, the IMM notes that their approach is increasingly moving towards the application of their self-assigned slogan: “What would happen if quality improvement and organisational change were driven by patient experience” (Caroll FANCOTT). The idea is therefore to introduce a “patient experience” approach wherever possible, whether in micro-projects or larger projects.
It is therefore with this desire to place the patient experience at the heart of the establishment’s strategic management that the IMM’s professionals, with the support of the Steering Committee and the Quality, Risk Management and User Relations Department, will be addressing upcoming projects with this desire to put patient experience back at the heart of the institution’s strategic management: participation in the overhaul of the entire dialysis service, the reorganisation of the secretariats and the reorganisation of the outpatient department, including work on redesigning the patient information system
To find out more about the Institut Mutualiste Montsouris: imm.fr.
