Susan E. Mazer, Ph.D. Blog

Thoughts and ideas on healthcare

Hi, and welcome to my blog! I'm Susan E. Mazer -- a knowledge expert and thought leader on how the environment of care impacts the patient experience. Topics I write about include safety, satisfaction, hospital noise, nursing, care at the bedside, and much more. Subscribe below to get email notices so you won't miss any great content.

Like Politics, The Patient Experience is Local

February 23, 2018

“All politics are local.” This saying is often used to reinforce community participation and civic activism. The same is true for the patient experience. It’s all local. It is where the patient is; it is the patient’s mind and body; it is in the patient’s line of sight and field of interest, and it is everything

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Is The Patient Experience A Goal or An Organizational Strategy?

February 2, 2018

Members of Beryl Institute’s PX Connect Community recently shared that some patient experience directors are being asked to solve problems coming from patient complaints. While I understand how this happens, I think the questions to ask are what can healthcare organizations learn from “complaints” and are they “fixing problems” or strategically improving the patient experience?

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The Patient Experience is Everywhere

January 12, 2018

Healthcare is again changing and with it, the understanding of the patient experience. For example, my insurance will let me go to a CVS Pharmacy or Minute Clinic for things like immunizations and vaccinations. Am I a customer or a patient? However, it does not feel like I am a “patient” in the most traditional

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A New Look at Whole Person Care

January 5, 2018

This past year, healthcare has taken both steps forward and steps back. In many ways, healthcare leaders remain stuck and unable to agree on what the major issues are: disease or cost? Staffing or safety? Population health or reimbursement? Improving Health With Whole Person Care In a recent post on Managed HealthCare Executive, healthcare CEO Leanne Berge calls

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Are You Ready to Improve the Patient Experience With Virtual Reality?

November 10, 2017

The speed with which media technologies have changed in my lifetime is astounding. My parents listened to the radio. When I was six years old, we got a television. After that came stereo sound. Then cassettes and CDs. Computers. DVDs. The Internet. Smart phones. Now: Virtual Reality! However, while the application of media technologies in

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“N” of One Holds the Key to the Patient Experience

November 3, 2017

Those of us in healthcare often talk about how difficult it is to study the patient experience because of variables that are not only complex but subjective and unique. How do we generalize what can be only understood when we deeply investigate the circumstance and motivation for an individual patient’s answers to our questions? How do

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Can We Meaningfully Dissect the Patient Experience?

October 20, 2017

When value-based purchasing began, the patient experience was measured by the 31-question HCAHPS survey that sought to better understand what happened to patients from their point of view. But since none of the questions are actionable or easily generalized, is the HCAHPS survey really all that valuable? What else do we need to know to

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Is Integrative Medicine in Better Alignment With the New Patient Experience Model?

October 13, 2017

Last month, billionaires Henry and Susan Samueli donated $200 million to the University of California Irvine to build a College of Health Sciences that will incorporate integrative health research, teaching, and patient care across its schools and programs. The pushback has been rather dramatic. Medical school faculty at U.C. Irvine immediately criticized this facility. Others

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The Invaluable Nature of Patient Stories

October 6, 2017

I have written about patient stories before. I have even told my own patient story. And last week, I heard another memorable patient story. Kristen Terlizzi, the keynote speaker at the Beryl Institute Regional Roundtable in Palo Alto, Calif., provided carefully thought out detail about her a high-risk pregnancy and subsequent rare condition called placenta accreta.

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7 Things You Can Do To Support Shared Decision-Making

September 22, 2017

This month, Mayo Clinic’s medical education journal published an article by Texas A&M Professor Leonard L. Berry and others about “Hostage Bargaining Syndrome” (HBS). HBS is what happens when the power differential between physicians and patients is perceived to be a barrier to shared decision-making. The only difference between patients and their caregivers – whether physicians,

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