Message on the Patient Experience

2022 was a year where we continued our focus on recognition and appreciation, as gratitude is needed more than ever. It was a year where we continued our relentless focus on equity—actively shining a light on our patient feedback, which lacked voices of color, and leveraging predictive analytics to help. Please join us in celebrating a few milestones in the areas below.

You will read about something that is critically important to us: storytelling. Sharing stories helps move hearts and minds and can be an important force in driving positive change. Often there are no better people to tell those stories than our patients. Our office looks to our patient survey comments and other forms of patient feedback to see who left powerful, celebratory feedback about the care they received. We partner with these patients to share their story in a compelling way that can change the lives of our staff. You will read about how a survey comment from a patient prompted us to celebrate a Mount Sinai housekeeper on a national stage.

We continually learn from our colleagues across the Health System who partner with their patients in powerful ways. You will read about the inspiring work of our Pediatrics Department to partner with youth and parents to advance care.

Last, we are excited to continue to share the progress from our employee engagement survey. The survey, coined Your Voice Counts, is a place where our staff can provide honest feedback about their experiences working here, all with the goal to make our Health System a better place to work, learn, teach, and receive care. You’ll read about how colleagues are acting on these insights to drive real change.

Please celebrate and elevate your colleagues highlighted in this report. Thank you for reading, we look forward to sharing our collective achievements from 2023.

– Erica Rubinstein, MS, LCSW, CPXP

The 2023 Annual Report on Patient Experience in the Mount Sinai Health System tells an important story. Through words, pictures, and videos, the Report describes how Mount Sinai put our patients and our employees front and center, even as we struggled through the aftermath of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.

Our experience during the pandemic has taught us three lessons about patient experience and employee engagement.

First, the key to meeting what has become a global workforce crisis is to listen to the people with whom we work, particularly those who care for patients every day. In our inaugural “Your Voice Counts” survey, our staff told us that workforce stability matters; it’s tough to disconnect; errors should be studied, not penalized; and efforts to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion have not gone unnoticed. As a Health System, we’ve endeavored to address the themes that emerged from this survey to create a more welcoming and inviting post-pandemic organizational culture.

Second, recognition matters. During the depths of the pandemic, the evening clanking of pots and pans across the five boroughs encouraged our employees to push on, to shoulder the burden of caring for our fellow New Yorkers despite risks that were unknown but potentially lethal. Our colleagues on the front lines of care at Mount Sinai miss this acknowledgement. Recognizing the extraordinary work that occurs every day—and not taking this work for granted—is another way to establish a post-pandemic culture that attracts workers and patients to our Health System.

And third, coming out of the pandemic, we see storytelling as complementing the analysis of data to guide improvements in patient experience at the Mount Sinai Health System. Our caregivers relate in profound ways to stories of extraordinary interactions between patients and their physicians, nurses, and the staff who support their hospital stays, emergency room visits, or outpatient appointments. Storytelling makes the data come to life, creating emotional connections and memorable reminders of what exceptional care looks and feels like.

So please take some time to review this Annual Report. The Report captures who we were as we emerged from the pandemic, and it tells stories of exceptional and emotionally connected patient care, of staff who are engaged daily in transforming ordinary encounters into extraordinary experiences for our patients.

– Art

Arthur A. Gianelli
Chief Transformation Officer, Mount Sinai Health System
President, Mount Sinai Morningside