Patient Experience and Safety Specialist

• Job Type: Officer of Administration
• Regular/Temporary: Regular
• Hours Per Week: 35
• Standard Work Schedule: Core business hours Monday-Friday, schedules vary
• Salary Range: $110,000.00 - $120,000.00

Position Summary

The Patient Safety and Experience Specialist will coordinate patient safety and patient-centered activities across the ColumbiaDoctors Faculty Practice Organization. Reporting directly to the Associate Director, Patient Safety, the Patient Safety and Experience Specialist will work closely and collaboratively with the clinical leadership, the health information management team, practice managers, and staff to facilitate patient relations, patient experience, and patient safety initiatives. That includes serving as a subject matter expert in service recovery responses that arise from patient grievances/complaints. Gathers data detailing patient complaints, grievances, and patient-related safety events. Conducts analysis in collaboration with departments, divisions, and interdisciplinary groups focusing on identifying and addressing systems issues that impact patients' interactions with ColumbiaDoctors and require re-engineering. Recommends changes, policies, or programs that could prevent future errors and improve patient experience. Identifies educational needs, develops and presents training materials. Attends presentations and training programs meant to increase awareness of patient safety and experience initiatives. Assesses patient experience and patient safety knowledge of employees and recommends changes to training programs. Familiar with a variety of the field's concepts, practices, and procedures. Relies on experience and judgment to plan and accomplish goals.

Key resources include ColumbiaDoctors' electronic health record, various analytics solutions, patient safety event reporting platform, patient experience survey platform, and other applicable software programs. This position offers a unique opportunity for an effective change agent to work with clinicians, researchers, and clinical and operational staff to strengthen the safety mission at one of the largest academic multi-specialty practice organizations in the nation.

Responsibilities

Operations

• Manages patient complaints and grievances from patient care originated in the Faculty Practice Organization, including but not limited to conducting medical record review, interviewing involved personnel, and developing a timeline of the occurrence.
• Communicates with patients who have concerns, complaints, grievances, or general feedback about their care experience to facilitate resolution and service recovery, including speaking directly to patients during investigations, drafting letters of acknowledgement, and follow-up correspondence.
• Utilizes a high degree of judgement, prioritization, problem-solving, and empathic decision-making to complete a comprehensive review of patient concerns, including activating appropriate levels of service recovery processes and procedures to improve patient satisfaction.
• Collaborates with clinical and administrative leadership (including the Executive Director, Patient Access) to implement patient-centered initiatives, including those originated from patient grievances as well as those for proactive growth of patient experience.
• Utilizes a "systems thinking" model in support of patients, faculty, and staff, with an emphasis on Just Culture principles.
• Utilizes the ColumbiaDoctors adverse event reporting system to organize event investigations, including attaching supporting documents and closing out relevant cases.
• Actively identifies patient experience opportunities based upon data obtained from multiple sources and in close collaboration with Patient Access analytics.
• Coordinate the investigation of complaints, grievances, and safety events, facilitate root cause analyses, apparent cause analyses, and monitor corrective action plans and measures of success.
• Conducts surveillance, analysis, and data reporting for patient safety, while complying with regulatory/accreditation requirements.
• Participates in the implementation of standardized patient experience clinical practices at the system and practice level.
• Demonstrates a theoretical foundation in the principles and practices of patient and customer experience to provide educational and coaching opportunities for staff and providers.
• Leverages lessons learned and communicates recommendations/required actions to avoid future exposure of harm to patients to key stakeholders and identified committees.
• Serves as a subject matter expert on internal and external patient relations and experience matters. Collaborates with system and facility teams as assigned. Provides education and resources to address changes, identify gaps in compliance, and educate leaders and staff on patient safety and experience requirements.
• Performs all other duties as assigned within the scope of practice, education, licensure, and training.

Strategy

• Supports the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Quality Officer in the development of a roadmap/platform to structure, standardize, and deploy Patient Experience at ColumbiaDoctors organizationally.
• Use data to identify trends and gaps. Uses dashboards and reports to monitor key performance indicators of patient safety and patient grievance workflows to ensure a holistic view of the related activities.
• Identifies key topics and best practices for optimization and establishes mechanisms to share expertise and knowledge amongst peers and stakeholders.

People

• Cultivates effective collaborative relationships with academic departments and other subject matter experts (SME) to seek resolution of issues identified through monthly monitoring of KOIs/KPIs.
• Mentors others in individual and team accountability, modeling behavior, and sharing best practices/techniques. Promotes peer professionalism and performance with coaching, training, and feedback.
• Demonstrates self-development and keeps current on a variety of patient safety and patient experience-related topics.

Compliance and Other

• Represents the Quality team on committees, task forces, and workgroups as assigned.
• Keeps current on all organizational, regulatory compliance, and patient privacy trainings policies (e.g., infection control, public safety, EH&S, HIPAA, OSHA, etc.) and successfully completes all required trainings.

This list of duties and responsibilities is not intended to be all-inclusive and may be expanded to include other duties or responsibilities as necessary.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree and 4 years of related experience in Public Health, Health Policy, Health Administration, nursing, or another clinical healthcare-related field
• Current, unrestricted registered nurse license to practice in New York State.
• An equivalent combination of education and experience may be considered.
• Experience with various methods and skills for complaint, grievance, and adverse event reporting, monitoring, and investigation, including root cause analysis, failure mode effect analysis, and other tools.
• Familiarity with US and New York State health care regulations and state reporting requirements.
• Familiarity with the ACA complaint and investigation procedures.
• Requires highly developed problem-solving skills.
• Requires the ability to manage programs and projects.
• Requires demonstrated excellence in interpersonal and written communication skills.
• Ability to work collaboratively with diverse teams.
• Must successfully pass systems training requirements.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree preferred.
• 5 years of experience with patient safety/ risk management, and patient experience.
• Certified Professional in Patient Safety (CPPS) is preferred.
• Certified Patient Experience Professional (CPXP) is preferred or achieved within one (1) year of hire.
• Experience with process improvement concepts and tools, group facilitation, data management, and analysis, including graphic development and presentations, is highly desirable.

Competencies

Patient Facing Competencies

Minimum Proficiency Level

Accountability & Self-Management

Level 3 - Intermediate

Adaptability to Change & Learning Agility

Level 3 - Intermediate

Communication

Level 3 - Intermediate

Customer Service & Patient Centered

Level 3 - Intermediate

Emotional Intelligence

Level 3 - Intermediate

Problem Solving & Decision Making

Level 3 - Intermediate

Productivity & Time Management

Level 3 - Intermediate

Teamwork & Collaboration

Level 3 - Intermediate

Quality, Patient & Workplace Safety

Level 3 - Intermediate

Leadership Competencies

Minimum Proficiency Level

Business Acumen & Vision Driver

Level 1-Introductory

Performance Management

Level 2- Basic

Innovation & Organizational Development

Level 1 - Introductory

Equal Opportunity Employer / Disability / Veteran

Columbia University is committed to the hiring of qualified local residents.