Four Areas of Focus for Improving the Patient Experience

In an age where customer experience reigns supreme, the healthcare industry is beginning to view processes and outcomes through a similar lens. Hospitals and healthcare systems are businesses. Patients are customers. And customers must have a positive experience in order to continue using the services of a business.

Patient experience is a term often applied broadly to initiatives such as reducing hospital stay length and readmission rates, cutting down incidences of patient safety events, and ensuring patients feel seen and heard.

In an effort to get a hold of this new way of thinking, hospitals are adding patient experience leaders to their staff and also considering the myriad sources that impact the patient experience. Risk managers and patient safety professionals have a unique opportunity to champion patient experience efforts for their organizations. Here are four areas of focus for improving the patient experience with the help of risk management best practices.

1. Get the Whole Organization Involved and Invested

With a far-reaching goal like improving patient experience, healthcare organizations will see greater success when they establish a targeted strategy and communicate that strategy clearly across all departments.

In many cases, it may make sense to establish an enterprise risk management (ERM) program to make headway. A healthcare ERM program standardizes how risk is identified across the organization, encourages cross-departmental collaboration, and shifts hospitals from a reactive clinical approach to a proactive, holistic one.

An ERM program that’s launched from the patient safety or risk management department will gain steam when tied to leadership’s most important goals, which increasingly include a patient experience component. After demonstrating ERM’s value, the right healthcare risk management technology comes into play. Tools like risk assessments, surveys, and patient safety event reporting (more on this below) can help break the broader strategy into manageable pieces that collectively produce powerful data.

After gathering this data, organizations can then use healthcare analytics to assess risks and develop controls. Analytics functionalities like root cause analysis allow organizations to see trends in patient satisfaction, as well as any outlying data that may require special attention. These trends are also useful in establishing organization-specific benchmarks to gauge patient experience improvements over time.

2. Actively Listen to Patient Needs

Listening to patients’ feedback is harder than it sounds for healthcare organizations with a constant flow of patients and, as is often the case, too few (or overworked) clinicians. After administering care, many clinicians must quickly move on to the next patient. Very few have the time to sit down for a deep discussion on a patient’s personal experience of care.

Patients expect their experiences to be personal every step of the way, and this starts with feeling heard. Research from the Beryl Institute’s 2024 Global Healthcare Consumer Report — drawn from respondents across 13 countries — found that human connection consistently outweighs processes and physical environment as a driver of patient experience. Safe care, clear communication, and respectful treatment ranked as patients’ top priorities. Feeling seen as a person shapes whether patients trust and return to the organizations that care for them.

This is especially true in an environment where health and life are at stake. That’s why Origami Risk’s healthcare risk management platform features a Patient Experience module to collect and examine feedback from patients in an organized and meaningful way.

The Patient Experience module tracks complaints, grievances, requests, and compliments in a single consolidated repository. This flexible module allows for data entry from any location and any device, and integrated patient portals and survey tools allow patients to report issues and concerns (anonymously, if desired) directly through the platform.

Combining these reporting options with automated notifications to staff members leads to higher levels of staff engagement in the overall patient experience, as well as speedier resolution in the case of urgent complaints.

The Patient Experience portal also integrates with ADT/HL7, which houses patient demographics.

This allows risk managers and patient safety professionals to begin finding meaning from the data collected. For example, if they see an influx of complaints from the elderly population, they can take a more targeted approach to resolution. Dashboards, reports, and analytics provide tailored reporting to leadership and other stakeholders, helping keep the organization on strategy.

3. Spare Clinicians Excessive Administrative Work

Making time to be physically present and available to patients matters alongside surveys when it comes to bettering the patient experience.

The administrative burden on clinicians has reached significant scale. According to American Medical Association data from 2024, physicians spend an average of 13 hours per week on indirect patient care, including documentation, order entry, and referrals, plus another 7.3 hours on purely administrative tasks like prior authorization and insurance forms, out of a 57.8-hour workweek. Time lost to administrative work is time unavailable for direct patient connection.

This challenge has drawn sustained regulatory attention. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services maintains an Office of Healthcare Experience and Interoperability dedicated to reducing administrative burden on the healthcare workforce and advancing interoperability with the explicit goal of giving clinicians more time for direct patient care.

Origami Risk’s healthcare risk management software can help in this endeavor, as well. Customizable forms and intuitive data entry are designed to make patient safety event reporting as simple and efficient as possible. For example, dynamic forms can be deployed that automatically self-adjust based on a user’s selections, narrowing the fields that must be completed to those that apply to a specific role or set of circumstances.

Improved incident reporting reduces the administrative burden on doctors and nurses, freeing time for direct patient care and producing the cleaner data needed to reduce diagnostic error. The better the incident collection process, the cleaner the data and the more accurate the analysis that can be done. As hospitals begin to understand the reasons for diagnostic errors, those responsible for doing so are better able to address and prevent them.

4. Improve Internal Communication

Broken processes and lack of communication inevitably lead to an increase in diagnostic errors and increased levels of frustration — on both the clinician and patient side. When communication breaks down across care teams, errors go undetected longer and take more effort to untangle. In environments already stretched for time and resources, that breakdown can cascade into serious patient safety incidents.

Beyond hazardous errors, this miscommunication may also cause stress and resentment among hospital staff and patients alike. Automated processes and streamlined communication produce smoother-running operations and, by extension, happier clinicians able to deliver better patient experiences. Origami Risk’s built-in automation functionality helps get all team members on the same page by assigning tasks and firing off notifications when action is needed, whether that’s a nurse reporting an adverse event or a patient safety manager following up with an upset patient.

One Healthcare Goal, One Integrated Risk Management System

Making the patient experience a success requires involvement from every level of an organization. By first making it a high-level strategic initiative and then breaking it down into smaller, tangible goals, hospitals can manage what may at first seem like an elusive mission. With everyone from clinicians to risk managers to patient safety managers on the same page, the right technology can seal the deal. Origami Risk’s survey tools, patient portal, automation functionality, streamlined communication, and healthcare analytics allow hospitals to meet patients where they expect to be met, thereby moving the needle on patient experience in significant ways.