Patient Satisfaction Scores Near Perfect at Nationwide Children’s Hospital After Implementation of EASE

// By Jane Weber Brubaker //

After Ashley Hodge finished the book, If Disney Ran Your Hospital: 9 ½ Things You Would Do Differently, she was thinking about ways to make the experience of the families at Nationwide Children’s Hospital even better. But how do you improve on an 80 percent patient satisfaction score?

Ashley Hodge, MBA, CCP, FPP, Cardiovascular Surgery Quality and Safety Officer and Cardiothoracic Perfusionist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital

The image of the moment when the child is wheeled into the operating room gave her a vision for what needed to change. “A lot of times when we take the children from their families, the child is crying, they’re screaming, they’re reaching for mom. And then we take the child into the operating room,” says Hodge, Cardiovascular Surgery Quality and Safety Officer and Cardiothoracic Perfusionist. “And then they have six to 12 hours away from their child while they’re having major heart surgery, sitting in a waiting room.”

Hodge wanted to find a way to keep families connected throughout the procedure. “The concept I wanted to embrace and initiate at our hospital was taking the family on a journey with us, and it’s not a separation,” she says.

After trying unsuccessfully to build a secure solution to enable communications between the OR and the waiting room, Hodge learned about EASE Applications. EASE is an acronym for Electronic Access to Surgical Events. “They were creating exactly what I had envisioned,” she says. After a successful pilot, Hodge was effusive in her praise. “It was one of the most fabulous things that has happened from a patient experience standpoint.”

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