Tips for Integrating Patient Partners on Improvement Teams
- Determine how often patients will attend improvement team meetings. Some practices have meetings twice a month and integrate patients into one of those meetings. This leaves one meeting per month to discuss business-related issues that the practice may not be ready to share with patients. However, this approach may also create discontinuity between meetings and make it difficult for patients to follow unless meeting agenda topics do not cross between meetings, which may be difficult to achieve.
- Select two or three patients who can commit to attend the quality improvement (QI) team meetings regularly and can provide “constructive criticism” and input to the team. Practices implementing this approach typically ask patients to make at least a 1-year commitment to being a Patient Partner.
- Create an environment where the patients are encouraged to participate and share positive and negative thoughts and experiences.
- Provide some background and training in QI for Patient Partners. While Patient Partners are experts at representing the patients’ perspective of the practice, they may not be familiar with QI processes, standard QI data reports, and commonly used acronyms.
- To make the meeting time most productive, provide some advance preparation to the Patient Partners. Many practices that have integrated Patient Partners have received support from community collaborative organizations, such as special training sessions to help them prepare for their new roles.
- Give the Patient Partners the same kinds of tasks and activities that staff members would do. For example, Patient Partners can be valuable in doing walkthroughs and conducting interviews with other patients. Similarly, give Patient Partners the ability to add issues to the team’s agenda. They may identify issues from the patient perspective that staff do not recognize as problems.
Resources for Patient Partners
- Abelson J, Canfield C, Leslie M, Levasseur MA, Rowland P, Tripp L, Vanstone M, Panday J, Cameron D, Forest PG, Sussman D, Wilson G. Understanding patient partnership in health systems: lessons from the Canadian patient partner survey. BMJ Open 2022 Sep 7;12(9):e061465.
- Johnson KE, Mroz TM, Abraham M, Figueroa Gray M, Minniti M, Nickel W, Reid R, Sweeney J, Frosch DL, Ness DL, Hsu C. Promoting Patient and Family Partnerships in Ambulatory Care Improvement: A Narrative Review and Focus Group Findings. Adv Ther 2016 Aug;33(8):1417-39. doi: 10.1007/s12325-016-0364-z. Epub 2016 Jun 28.
- Roseman D, Osborne-Stafsnes J, Amy CH, et al. Early lessons from four 'Aligning Forces For Quality' communities bolster the case for patient-centered care. Health Aff 2013;32(2):232-41.
