Pennsylvania Hospital welcomed Cassandra A. Cuesta, MHA, CPXP, as its new director of Patient Experience, joining March 23rd from Temple University Hospital. Despite only being in the role for a few months, Cuesta already feels part of the Penn Medicine family and has been working to strengthen the patient experience at the nation’s oldest hospital.
What was your journey to PAH like?
I started my career at Temple University Hospital (TUH) and served multiple roles over the past seven years. I first worked in the Performance Improvement and Medical Staff Affairs office and facilitated our monthly Performance Improvement Committee. I then saw an opening in Patient Experience at Temple, and while I didn’t have much background in it, I was determined to work hard and take myself, my team, and patient experience at TUH to the next level. Our team developed “The Temple Experience,” a service excellence employee recognition program and created Temple’s first patient and family advisory council. Under our guidance, we grew the volunteer program, increasing our members from 15 volunteers in 2015 to 200 volunteers by 2020 and establishing it as a nationally recognized program. I attribute these accomplishments and many others to having a great team, and I can already tell that I have that here at Pennsy as well. Everyone has been extremely welcoming, and I’m excited to see what we can achieve together.
What is the scope of your role?
Much of my role includes analyzing patient satisfaction data to implement best practices and performance improvement initiatives to improve our patients’ and their families’ experiences. We want practical feedback to provide to managers and frontline staff to know where their strengths and opportunities are. Some of this data is collected through paper or digital surveys distributed to patients, online reviews, and social media comments. We’re looking at comments and reviews in a whole new way, looking beyond whether it’s positive or negative. Humanizing data and sharing stories and experiences is how we’re going to improve engagement and consistency in our branding and messaging of the Penn Medicine Experience. In addition, I oversee the Patient and Guest Relations, Pastoral Care, Volunteer Services, Language Assistance, and the Welcome Desk. While they all have different nuances, they all tie together and impact the overall patient experience.
What are your plans for Patient Experience at PAH?
There have been a lot of moving pieces, such as bringing back our volunteers, patient and family advisors and therapy dog program [after suspending these in-person programs during the pandemic], developing a task force to pilot a new way to track patients’ belongings if they’re lost, and getting the welcome desk a new visitor management system to better track people in the hospital. We’re working on implementing a new volunteer management system in order to streamline the volunteer onboarding process and make it electronic. Another plan in motion is the recruitment of patients and caregivers for our Patient-Family Advisory Council who will meet with staff to help improve our clinical performance. In addition to these initiatives, I want to work on developing a Patient Experience Committee that represents all aspects of the patient experience, including inpatient, outpatient, and ancillary services. It will give employees a space to share their practices and inform others about what’s going on at the hospital. Everyone impacts the patient experience and has a role in it whether they know it or not.