The primary goal of ethnography is to assess the entire patient experience from the patient and family perspective, reveal barriers to low HCAHPS scores, and provide detailed recommendations for improvement.

If your organization’s goal is to fully understand the patient experience, no form of research surpasses ethnography for achieving experiential depth and insight.  By placing ourselves in the patient’s environment for an extended period of time, we bring to light the patient satisfaction barriers that often go undetected or unreported by staff.  

The benefits to our clients have been far-reaching by stripping away silos, miscommunication, and faulty processes.  This allows the organization to clearly see what the patient sees (quite literally as we identify environmental issues).  

Because our findings present immediate and actionable feedback, our solutions correlate directly to improved satisfaction scores. These detailed studies identify the cultural, process, and people issues (often unseen by the provider) that lead to patient dissatisfaction. 

In addition to patient interviews, visitors to the patient room are also often interviewed.  Observations are primarily based on HCAHPS-related issues such as communication, cleanliness, and noise.

An extensive review of the patient experience by unit or department is provided which includes interview data analysis, people, place and process related themes, non-employee photographs, and recommendations.  We also conduct briefings with participating unit/department leadership and the CNO if appropriate prior to departure.  Onsite presentations of the findings are available upon request.

Contact us today to begin seeing and hearing what the patient sees and hears.

Harvard Business Review Article Features Perception Strategies Ethnography

An extensive ethnography study conducted by Perception Strategies in 2012 for the Cleveland Clinic is featured in the May Issue of the Harvard Business Review in an article entitled Health Care’s Service Fanatics. Written by Dr. James Merlino, head of Cleveland Clinic’s Office of Patient Experience, and Ananth Raman, our study is described as an “anthropological examination of a nursing unit that had received some of the Clinic’s worst scores in the CMS survey."