In this episode of the DrMarketingTips podcast, you’ll be able to listen in to the full presentation Jennifer gave at the Bones Society of Florida Annual Meeting alongside Kevin Joyce, executive director for Orlando Orthopaedic Center.

The duo shared the stage to discuss why implementing ongoing employee engagement and training is crucial to medical practices and the real results one of the largest orthopaedic practices in Central Florida has experienced to date.

Through a combination of on-demand employee training and offline, real-world activities, contests and promotions the practice has seen:

• Almost 3x the number of positive online reviews since the promotion started
• More than 90% of participants say the training was beneficial and helped them understand their role at the practice
• 77% of participants say they’re now better equipped to do their job

Tune in to discover:

• The why, how and what behind the ongoing employee engagement initiative
• The direct correlation between star ratings and revenue
• Key areas for measurement, practice growth and employee retention moving forward
• A full breakdown of the delivery of patient experience training, results, and lessons learned

Transcription Notes

Announcer: Dr Marketing Tips? Paging Dr Marketing Tips. Dr Marketing Tips, you’re needed in the marketing department. Welcome to the Dr Marketing Tips Podcast, your prescription to the answers you seek to grow your medical practice easier, better, and faster. This show is all about connecting practice administrators and medical marketing professionals with peers working in practices, learning from experiences, making mistakes, and sharing successes. Let’s get started.

Corey: Hey, guys. Corey here with the Dr Marketing Tips Podcast. I am one half of the host of the show. The other host, Jennifer, she’s actually just finished up at the Bone Society of Florida in their annual meeting. She was giving a presentation alongside Kevin Joyce, who is the executive director for Orlando Orthopaedic Center. And in this very special episode of the Dr Marketing Tips Podcast, you’re going to listen in to the full presentation that Jennifer gave alongside Kevin.

Corey: So while they were on stage, the duo discussed why implementing ongoing employee engagement and training is crucial to medical practices and the results that they saw at Orlando Orthopaedic Center. So through a combination of on-demand employee training and offline activities, contests, and promotion, Kevin’s group actually saw an increase of three times the number of positive online reviews since the promotion started, and more than 90% of the participants say that the training was beneficial and helped them understand their role at the practice. It’s really good stuff. I’m really excited to share it with you. And we hope you enjoy it.

Kevin Joyce: I’m going to talk a little bit about how we got to what you see on the screen there because just that alone, I don’t even know how long, how many weeks it took just to go through is this the image? Is this the … So we’ll go through that. Jen’s got a whole ton of slides to go through the mechanics and the actual process that we went through to launch what we call Patient Experience 2.0, what that means.

Kevin Joyce: But before we get into the actual program itself, about a year ago we were at this same conference, and a lot of things were going on with our practice. We’d had a pretty challenging year in 2018. And it was like, “Okay, we need something to really kind of to boost the moral, boost the whole kind of mood of the group from the top down.”

Kevin Joyce: So out of one of the sessions that I went to with another orthopedic conference, we got hooked up with a organization called The Barral Institute. And they are a large call it a consulting firm that focuses on just patient experience. You can go to their website, thebarralinstitute.com, and they have a whole curriculum and a whole program that you can join. And so we started poking around and looking at, okay, what’s out there?

Kevin Joyce: And many of you have already done some of these programs with either The Ritz-Carlton. There’s the Disney Institute. And us being in Orlando, we looked at a bunch of those because we got a Ritz-Carlton, we got Disney. And I think many organizations have had a lot of success with investing and going through those types of programs. But we wanted to try to do something different. Those programs can be very expensive. A two-day session runs like $50,000 just for the Disney Institute.

Kevin Joyce: And we wanted something that really was kind of like throughout the whole organization. And so we started looking at some ideas. We became a member of The Barral Institute. We enrolled in their PX 101 course, which is actually one of their kind of basic curriculums that have videos on there. And you can use The Barral Institute as kind of your platform, so to speak. But you still have to have people, and you have to have program.

Kevin Joyce: And we said, “Okay, this Barral Institute thing isn’t just going to solve our problems. It’s a good idea. It gave us good ideas. And we’re going to focus what types of training. So even before this whole idea of a Patient Experience Initiative came up, we started working with our managers at Orlando Orthopaedic Center. Several of them are here with some management coaching. And we said, “You know, if we’re going to do anything with our employees and get them moved up in a way that makes them more satisfied, productive, and ultimately leads to better patient experience, we really need to have good managers too that know what they’re doing when it comes to how they interact and engage with their employees.”

Kevin Joyce: So before we even did this, we engaged a consultant locally in Orlando to start doing management team coaching. And at a very high level, I won’t go into the details of that, it really focused on their strengths, in some cases their weaknesses, but mostly strengths of, okay, how are we all different? What traits do we have? and then starting to work on things with them specific to their departments and their staff.

Kevin Joyce: And I had no idea how that was going to turn out. I convinced my board to spend some money on that. It wasn’t a ton, but it was still a little bit of a budget. And they’re like, “Okay, where are we going to go with this, Kevin, because are we just going to forever just have this coach hanging around?” I said, “No. I got a plan. But we got to build up our core and our people that are going to be really running this thing, which are managers, I think.”

Kevin Joyce: And we have over 300 employees at Orlando Orthopaedic Center, eight offices, which we’ll talk about in a little bit about the challenges with having eight different offices around Orlando. And we have a very robust marketing budget because it’s a very competitive market in Orlando. So we spend money on all kinds of sponsorships, and teams, and different events, and a lot of the same stuff you guys probably do.

Kevin Joyce: But we wanted to try to figure out how to make this work from a budgetary standpoint, so I mentioned we had a consultant, brought them in. That started to produce some pretty good results, kind of boosting the level of the morale and capabilities of our managers who in many cases, as you know, never have any formal management training experience. You’re coming up through the ranks. Ten years ago, you might’ve worked at the front desk, and now you’re the manager of the front desk. But did you really have any formal training?

Kevin Joyce: So some of that was kind of, again, the building block or foundation for why and how we did patient experience. So towards the end of 2018, we’re wrapping up our coaching with our managers. And we’re still doing that, by the way. That’s still integrated into kind of our monthly work with our managers. But out of the meetings, we got more information from the Barral Institute. We said, “Well, how are we going to do this ourselves?”

Kevin Joyce: So Jen Thompson, full disclosure, she is our marketing firm, so to speak. She has some staff and handles and coordinates a lot of our marketing activities. Some of them have to do with technology and how we basically roll out videos to the outside world but also starting to use some of those videos internally.

Kevin Joyce: So we went to Jen and said, “How can we take this basic idea of doing training, figuring out how to actually get this stuff in front of our employees, that, again, there’s 300 of them in different offices tucked away in all kinds of different buildings all over Orlando, and how do you bring a single idea of patient experience and also the why of why we’re doing this, how do you bring that out?”

Kevin Joyce: And we came up with a plan. And Jen’s going to show you that in great detail, so you’ll see the actual elements of that program. So I still have to get this in front of the board because there is a lot of parts and pieces. We had to make an investment to Jen because she on her own, which she’ll talk about a little bit, and some of you actually out there are using her platform, she created a whole video platform that allows our employees to log in, how to log in, watch videos, take tests.

Kevin Joyce: And so what we had to do also is build the curriculum, and we took some of the ideas, again, from the Barral Institute. We focused on really just basic what is patient experience like? Why did you come to work at a medical practice? Was it just to make some money? Was it to have a good career? Or is there something that you’re in the medical field specifically for, patient care, something to give back to the patients?

Kevin Joyce: And so we really had to build our whole reason for doing this, our why. And I also had to go and sell that to our docs. And they were like, some of the times that I have Jen come in and present, and I was presenting, they’re looking at me going, “Okay, shouldn’t we be just doing this stuff anyway? Why do we have to spend all this time?” The docs hate that kind of stuff.

Kevin Joyce: So basically we spend some time. We knew we had to have a budget to make this work. So one of the things that I did was I actually took some money out of the marketing budget to fund this whole program, and that made the doctors happy because it didn’t require spending more money. And really, at the end of the day, the reason why we’re doing this and the reason why we are really a business, and why the doctors ultimately in the board supported this was because everything we do now out there is reported, reviewed, scored, graded. And we have to have some way of influencing what people are saying about our doctors and our practice.

Kevin Joyce: And a lot of it is things about our staff, things about their experience in our offices, sometimes about the doctors. And as you know, most of you out there are doing some sort of reputation management program, and you’re focusing on whether your doc’s a 3.5 or a 4. And there’s vendors on the other side of the wall here that that’s all they do and focus on.

Kevin Joyce: So we have that program too, but we needed a way to focus on specifically how we improve our scores and improve our ratings. And we knew we had to do it with our staff and at the very kind of a basic level. But we got the board support, got them to approve our budget. And we were off.

Kevin Joyce: The one thing, though, that we felt was very important to put in place was some face-to-face time in some meetings. And that’s where with our staff and the get-together really kind of sent home the message because just taking videos that Jen’s going to show you here in a little bit really kind of just scratches the surface.

Kevin Joyce: So what we also did was with that coach, and I’ll give everyone … put her name out there in a little bit. And I actually have cards if anybody’s interested in talking to this person, whether it’s about management, your management team coaching or patient experience, because she works very closely now with Jen. And I think they’ve got a pretty good thing. So we also have this individual schedule a number of face-to-face meetings with our different departments and our different offices, which took a lot of time because we have so many different departments, so many different offices that literally would take two weeks of scheduling and coordinating just for her to get around and go to schedule some lunches. And it’s an exhausting process.

Kevin Joyce: But the bottom line with this is that if you’re going to do anything like patient experience, and when Jen comes up and goes through the whole program, the one thing that I always said is you got to be very intentional about what you’re doing, and you got to have an organized plan and program, which I think we did. You got to have a budget. All in.

Kevin Joyce: This program is costing Orlando Orthopaedic Center about $60,000 a year to put this on. Some of it goes to Jen because she coordinates the curriculum. She’s got the video program and the whole platform. And then I’ve got Alicia Culp, who’s the consulting coach that we use. And she’s, obviously her time, it takes some money out of the budget as well because she’s spending many hours per month going around and doing all her things, doing face-to-face, working with some of the managers again on certain things that they have going on.

Kevin Joyce: And all I can say is that we have seen great results as far as back to the scores and the ratings and reviews. So we started this program actually last April. We do a practice-wide employee appreciation week in April. It’s got administrative staff or support week, and that’s our week where we do all these different things.

Kevin Joyce: So that was, again, an intentional thing that we launched the program in April. And since then, we have seen our reviews really literally triple from where they were prior to launching Patient Experience 2.0. And the percent of positive reviews are higher. Just the reviews themselves, as you know, many of you that are in the whole thing with reputation management, it’s about getting more reviews. And you’re always going to have some negative reviews, but we have a whole process around that of how that’s improved.

Kevin Joyce: So this is not really rocket science type of stuff. It’s really basic. Jen’s going to show you some of the actual training modules that we’ve gone through. And all I can say is that it’s been a great addition to our practice. We’re continuing to do it. It’s not a one-and-done. So it’s not like, “Hey, we did it,” and then we go on and do something else. I’ve had to convince my board that this is something that we’re going to do year in and year out. It’s going to become more and more of really what I see as our true marketing of the practice is getting our patients engaged in it, getting their satisfaction to be higher. Talked about that yesterday in some of the break-out sessions about how challenging it is to hire and retain staff.

Kevin Joyce: So this program is part of that. We looked at a retention. It was bad. We had a lot of turnover, and this was another ingredient to help fight that issue of just trying to hire good employees and keep the good employees. So Jen’s going to show you what we did with all the different … We had prizes, and contests and everything to get everybody excited. And that’s really going to be the main ingredient for today.

Kevin Joyce: I don’t have a ton to add to this other than I had a whole bunch of people come to me and say, “Let’s do this thing.” And I’m like, “Oh God, how are we going to do this?” My boards want to go, “I don’t want to do those things.” But we did it. And you guys can do it too. It doesn’t cost a lot of money, but you do have to spend some time and some money to make it happen, but it’s really pretty easy stuff.

Kevin Joyce: And I think the way Jen has set it up and the way she’s done it, and we’re very fortunate that we have Jen because we kind of built this thing together sort of front the ground up. So without that, I’ve been rambling on now for 14 minutes. So I’m going to have Jen come up now and really show you the true kind of essence of what we did and-

Corey: Hey, guys. Corey here, cohost of the Dr Marketing Tips Podcast. And I wanted to interrupt this episode just for a minute to tell you about Insight Training Solutions. So Insight Training Solutions is a ongoing employee engagement and training platform for your medical practice, meaning employees can log on and take these medical practice-specific trainings whenever and wherever they are. And each training is meant to increase employee engagement, improve practice reputation, and develop some patient service mindsets, if were being honest, something that we all know some of the employees may lack—not calling anybody out by name. But one of the cool things about Insight Training Solutions is they’re always developing new content, and they just released 10 Steps to a Phenomenal Patient Experience, where you’ll learn how to create a phenomenal patient experience, strengthen job security, and discover customer service secrets for your entire team.

Corey: So this course is in addition to the other ones they already have, which include Communication Across Generations and How to Understand Today’s Multi-Generational Workforce, and How to Develop Overall Patient Experience. This is another course, The New Approach to Customer Service. We’ve also got Eight Ways to Wow Patients. And you can sign up for a free trial to see what everything is about at insighttrainingtrainingsolutions.io. That’s insighttrainingsolutions.io, or just Google “Insight Training Solutions.” You’ll be glad you did.

Jen Thompson: Thank you, Kevin. That you, everybody, for being here this morning. Kevin had to herd cats last night with all of the ladies that he had to take out to dinner, myself included. So Patient Experience 2.0 is a program. It’s this is one of the curriculum that we designed. And it’s actually built in an LMS. LMS is a learning management system. So it’s a platform that’s out there that we took and then reskinned it specifically for Orlando Orthopaedic Center.

Jen Thompson: And then we’ve taken this program and actually trademarked it. And actually it’s going right now as a five-week program with South Florida Ortho, with Sandy and Barb’s group. So they’re here at Bones, and this program is running right now at their practice. And we have somebody there doing the workshops that you’ll see now.

Jen Thompson: So I’ll just go right through. We’ve got a bunch of slides to go through. Oh, and there’s a thing right here. All right, so why patient experience? Patient experience, I was sitting in the session yesterday with the large groups, and we were kind of listening to what it is that keeps you up at night. And everybody is up at night for some different reason except for the gentleman in the red shirt. He is not up at night. He sleeps perfectly fine, has nothing that concerns him at all.

Jen Thompson: But the idea is that the patient experience … You did say it. Kevin was like, “I don’t sleep at all, especially with all these marketing people.” But the patient experience is touched by it’s not just the doctors, and it’s not just the people that are checking patients in at the front desk. It’s even your billing department. It’s the experience that we have when you send me an invoice six weeks after my appointment, and I have to go find the reading glasses to be able to read the invoice. And it’s so difficult.

Jen Thompson: Then you told me to go back to the website to pay my invoice, which is difficult to find the pay button. Bless you. When I call your office, and I’m on hold for 10 minutes, this is all the patient experience. And yes, it’s the doctor, but it’s your website. It’s your telephone. It’s your social media. It’s the persona that you’re putting out there. It’s everything.

Jen Thompson: So we knew that we needed to address something as it related to patient experience. But fundamentally what we needed to address was the customer service at its root cost. I’m sure every one of you have been over to the other room and talked to a vendor to some degree, even if it’s beyond getting your stickers. You’ve talked to someone to some degree about what you need to do to manage your reputation.

Jen Thompson: Well, yeah, you need to get your hands around your reputation, but what you need to do is get to the fundamental issue of what it is that’s driving the reputation or what it is that’s driving the star ratings. And that’s what this was all about. It was about getting to the root of the problem and focusing on patient experience.

Jen Thompson: And the Patient Experience 2.0 is actually called Patient Experience 2.0: The New Approach to Customer Service to make sure that everybody is on the same page and understands together what it is about how they’re impacting the practice as a whole. And then why employees? Well, we want to focus on employees partly because the interaction is not just with doctors, it’s also with your employees. And that kind of encompasses the patient experience.

Jen Thompson: But also in the state of Florida and pretty much nationally, especially in Orlando, we are at full employment. And it’s tough to attract and retain employees. And if we can do something like spend a very incremental amount of dollars on the reinvesting in our employees, they feel as if you’re investing, Kevin’s investing in their professional development and we’re giving them something.

Jen Thompson: And so what we’ve developed was a learning management system that is gamified, which I’m a Generation X. But I tend to lean into the Millennials, and I grew up on video games. And so I’m the type of person in your practice and younger, we grew up receiving positive feedback, getting points, gamifying everything we’re doing, and so the system is set up like that. Even Karen can do it. So that’s kind of why patient experience and why employees.

Jen Thompson: And then back to you want to get to the fundamental reason. I’ll let you read this. But basically it’s called Womply Research. Womply is a company that did some analysis of 25,000 credit card transactions with free-standing medical practices. And they specifically looked at the correlation between star ratings and billing and the amount of money that you’re bringing in. And there’s a direct correlation with the stars that you have, 4.0 to 4.9, directly related to your revenue, meaning if you get better star ratings, people will choose your practice over the one down the street. Employees will also be paying attention through Glassdoor and through other mechanisms. And it’s all directly tied to revenue.

Jen Thompson: All right, so this is what we set up. We set up basically a promotion around this employee engagement effort that included on-demand training that’s, for this one in particular, it’s five weeks. We did it as a weekly. I have some practices that we work with that are doing them monthly. But it’s five weeks. It’s less than 10 minutes total for the employees to go online. They watch a little video. And at the end of the video, they take a test.

Jen Thompson: Then we had promotional activities, so marketing activities that tied it in to get employees to sign in. Then we did some workshops, and that was with Alicia at his practice. And then we did a bunch of team-building activities. So I’m going to go through that.

Jen Thompson: So on the right is just a picture of what it looks like. But basically I’m going to walk you through what we did for Orlando Orthopaedic Center. So we started the week of April 1st. On Monday employees receive an email. It says, “Hey, we’re going to do some training. This is your access. Get in there. Take your training.” And then when they didn’t take the training on Wednesdays, they get a reminder email. One thing that we did with Orlando Ortho and we’ve been doing with everyone is we started off with a link to a survey that employees can take. The survey says, “What does patient experience mean to you?”

Jen Thompson: And then we collect all this data so we understand what patient experience actually means to employees. And we used it in a really unique way, I think, with Orlando Orthopaedic Center. So this when we started on April 1st, told them this was happening. On April 8th, they got their email. They got a reminder on Wednesday. We do a gift card drawing, and then this committed to patient experience, everybody that completed their training for the week got a button that they then wore all throughout the practice.

Jen Thompson: On week two, we sent them their email on Monday, and on Wednesday we sent them out a reminder. Orlando Ortho is a very competitive group. They’re very competitive. Karen in particular is extremely competitive. She came over and said, “Where are my points?” things like that. So their managers have access to a dashboard. Their managers go in, look at the dashboard and see who on their team has taken or not taken the training. And then they also receive points.

Jen Thompson: Every time you log in, you get points. Every time you do something correct, you get points. They get little digital badges and things like that. We learned from that experience because there was somebody … It wasn’t you, Kevin. But there was somebody who was logging in like 50 times a day just to rack up points. So we learned from these experiences. We turned that part of it off.

Jen Thompson: So that was kind of week two, and then we have leader boards that we printed out, and we put them in all the break rooms and all the locations. And then we would go and write the points on so everybody would see it. And people were wearing their patient experience badges. And then we have an employee newsletter that we put out every single month it’s printed.

Jen Thompson: So we took the employee newsletter, and the winning department for that week, because it was a contest, it was featured in the newsletter, and then this over here on the right are the lunch and learns that Alicia was running in parallel to the stuff that we were doing online.

Jen Thompson: On the right, this is just an example, and I’ll show you some pictures. All right, well, then it just went to the next slide. So on the left is an example of the leader boards that we had in the offices. In the middle of there is our Bones Bulletin, which is our newsletter that we put out every single month. And then we have some happy employees over there holding up their patient experience cards, here.

Jen Thompson: The cards actually say, “Hi, my name is Jennifer. My job here is … And this is what I bring to my job.” And there’s a whole training program that goes with the workshops. And it’s really I think it’s a great workshop that goes with it that Alicia did. So week three is where it gets really interesting. So week three, we send them out the emails. We send them out the reminder emails, but week three was what the Barral Institute has coined Patient Experience Week and happened to coincide with the employee luncheon that we already had planned for the month.

Jen Thompson: So we handed out, so everybody had their little buttons that they wore. But then we handed out … Everyone wears a name badge. We handed out these PX 2.0 all-star ribbons that people affixed to their name badge and started wearing. And then we had tokens of appreciation. They’re little wooden tokens that have the logo stamped on them with a card. And these cards, we printed 5,000 of them, and we distributed them to every patient that walked into the practice this week.

Jen Thompson: And the card says, “We are committed to your experience. If we’re doing a good job and somebody had gone above and beyond, pay it forward by giving them this token. And if we’re not doing a great job, here’s a link to the website. We have a feedback page on the website. We want to hear what you have to say about it.”

Jen Thompson: So we handed out those tokens all month … I think we handed them out the entire month. We’ve actually taken them out of circulation because they’re like cash money. So we’ve taken them out of circulation, and we’re recirculating them right now this week actually through one of the programs that we’re running the next round of training.

Jen Thompson: And then we had the Employee Appreciation Lunch. And if you remember, I said we took a survey at the very beginning, the survey, the What Does Patient Experience Mean to Me? survey. So we collected all that data. And this is the week what we did something unique. This actually corresponded with the week of Easter. It was Easter Sunday. And I want to say that because it was difficult to get professional artists. We have mural artists come in that paint some of the big murals in town. And we had him come in over the Easter break and paint a mural on Kevin’s gutting like a focused wall, a feature wall. It’s like 20′ x 30′ when we walk into the main entrance of the practice.

Jen Thompson: So we took the feedback from the Patient Experience survey, and we put that in kind of a graphical rendition with the mural artist that came in. And I know a lot of you are like, “How much did that cost?” It cost no more than doing a vinyl that you would put up on your wall anyway. It was a couple thousand dollars to put that up. And them when employees walked in, they’re like, “Are you kidding me? This is amazing,” because it’s this big feature wall now, and it’s still up there. And I hope it stays up for a while because it’s a really cool wall, and people have taken photos with it and things like that.

Jen Thompson: So just some pictures. And I bring this up because this is actually social media. So what we do is we use all of the employee engagement activities, all of the workshops in the marketing. So employee engagement is the new marketing. I mean, really, that’s where it’s at right now. And especially if you’re on social media and things like that, you have to have your employees engaged because the employees, and their engagement, and having things that are engaging is how you’re going to have kind of that interaction to be able to promote the practice. So of course we used it all in all of our marketing activities.

Jen Thompson: So we thought these little frames were going to be used where people were going to take the handouts that we had at the workshops, and they were going to hold them up, like frame them. But no, people want to put their face in them, and then they want to post it on social media. So were taking care of that for them by posting it.

Jen Thompson: Some more pictures. That’s the featured wall. This is during Patient Experience Week, so all the employees. It’s a patient taking their picture in front of the featured wall. It’s super neat, the wall itself. So the patient comes. She wanted to do a testimonial. She’s like, “Take my picture in front of the wall.” People are taking it and they’re sharing it on Instagram, and they’re sharing it on Facebook.

Jen Thompson: So then week four, we handed out … We did the same thing Monday and Wednesday. They got their emails. We had more lunch and learns. This week we did another contest: Complete your training, get 100%. And the patient experience is pretty simple. The new training is a little more difficult. Lisa? Oh, she stepped out. Lisa told me, she was like, “It was so hard that the second one that I have to go back and redo it because I’m actually learning something.” And this one is just a dip your toe in to get you reminded on some patient experience and some customer service stuff.

Jen Thompson: So this week we said, “You get 100%, you’re in a drawing to win a $100 gift card,” which get people really excited. But then we have these little bumper stickers as well. I’m going to call them like refrigerator magnets that we handed out if you completed your training. And then we see on social media people are sharing that they got their bumper stickers. This is the best part.

Jen Thompson: So then of course we take it down, and we put it up on social. But look at this. Jessica Rivera says, “I saw one on I-4 on my ride out to Bradenton last weekend, #proudemployee.” That’s what this is all about. So week five we kind of wrapped it up, and we were like, “We’re exhausted at this point.” I mean, we were exhausted at this point. But we’re wrapping it up on week five, and they get their email. They get their reminder. We have all the stuff going on. We’re wrapping up all of the lunch and learns and things like that. Week six, we’re going to plan a big recognition. Everybody at the end of this, so they take their course, their training. At the very end they get a certificate of completion. That certificate of completion automatically sends to them, so they can just download it then.

Jen Thompson: But what it also does is it allows them automatically to share it on their social media profiles. So what that does is it says I’m Patient Experience 2.0. I’m PX 2.0 certified. We’ve created a certification. They share it on their social media channels. Specifically they shared on LinkedIn, and it automatically will send it and allow them to do it. And they’re telling the rest of the world that Orlando Orthopaedic Center has invested in them and in their professional development.

Jen Thompson: So we probably won’t do this part again because it was a lot. But we did mock graduations, so just to show so they have eight locations. Some of them are commingled because they’re walk-in clinics. But we went around to every location, and we had a mock graduation ceremony. And we had the little caps that people wore. And we had Patient Experience buttons. And we had little ribbons that we put on them that said “Class of 2019.” And we made a big to-do about all the employees completing it.

Jen Thompson: We took the wall mural and had them printed out professionally. We put them in nice little frames. And everybody who completed the PX 2.0 training got a copy of the wall mural, which was the compilation of what patients experience means to me as an employee. We see them all around people’s cubicles. And people would put them on display. And we saw everybody was wearing their buttons. And it was just kind of a fun thing. Kevin, it’s a good photo, Kevin.

Jen Thompson: And then we had cakes. I mean, who doesn’t love cake? All right, so this is kind of the results at this point. So when I presented to the doctors, the first things the doctors said is, “Well, this is all fine and dandy, Jen, but how are you going to measure this? We care about measurement only.” And so we said, “No problem, docs. We got this.” We’re going to measure positive. We’re going to measure the percentage of positive versus negative reviews.

Jen Thompson: We’re going to measure filtered reviews. Filtered reviews for us are the patient feedback page on your website. And instead of going online while somebody’s sitting in your waiting room for two hours because the doctor is running late, instead of going onto Google and complaining or on Facebook, “I’ve been sitting here for two hours. What’s going on?” they go to this page on the website, and they send you an email, said, “What’s going on?” And so we do that with all the practices we work with.

Jen Thompson: So we measured filter reviews. We are measuring employee retention, but I don’t think we have enough numbers at this point to truly see since we only started in April. We’re measuring that promoter score, so at the very beginning of this, when we did the patient experience survey, we also asked all the employees, “How likely are you to refer a friend or family member to work here at Orlando Orthopaedic Center?”

Jen Thompson: And so what that did is it gave us a baseline measurement. And now even with the second training, we’re asking them again. So we’re going to monitor that over the next year or so. And then we’re going to measure general feedback. So this means the doctor’s happy. And this, it might be a little difficult to see, but basically this is the dashboard that we provide to Kevin every single month, part of a bigger dashboard.

Jen Thompson: We measure all the positive versus the negative reviews. And as you can see, in 2018 pretty much the top line number is the number of reviews that we’ve been in. They have done 85% positive for the year, and then in 2019, January, February, March, everything was the same, but then you see when we started the training in April, this whole thing, I mean, it just changed.

Jen Thompson: We didn’t do anything different, anything at all other than engage our employees, and make sure that employees understand how they impacted the practice, and how marketing is different these days, and how people are choosing the practice. And we explained to them, we showed them, “These are the reviews. This is what we’re focused on, and this is how marketing works these days. And this is how people are selecting whether to come here or whether to go to Diane’s practice to do it right down the street.” So the only thing we changed was what we did. And you can see the numbers speak for themselves; a couple percentage points more positive than negative, but it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint by any means.

Jen Thompson: All right, so we went from about 4,500 reviews to about 5,600 reviews. We monitor those every single month. 4.1 to a 4.2-star rating, I know this doesn’t look like a lot, but when you have a giant ship that you have to turn, it’s very hard to get even a .1% review increase if you have this many reviews. Piece of advice for everybody in this room: If you have less than a couple hundred reviews, one or two negatives can significantly impact your star ratings. And you remember where I showed you the star ratings directly correlate to revenue? You have to put focus on getting more reviews.

Jen Thompson: So we did some baseline surveys of everything we did. We asked the managers. We asked the employees. Everything had a survey, at the end, at the beginning, so that we could measure it specifically for the doctors. “So did you think it was beneficial to your team?” This is like all the surveys are within a week of the program wrapping up. “Did you think it was beneficial?” “Yeah.” Did you think it was easy to use? Pretty much so, 77%, because remember, we have some older folks that aren’t as digitally … They’re not digital natives, so sometimes it was a little difficult. 99.99% of the problems, the challenges, were because people can’t remember what their password is, I’m just saying, 99.99%.

Jen Thompson: “Did you notice changes in the employee behaviors?” Almost 50% said yes. But I think if we took this again now, you’d see the numbers starting to go up because it was about a week after. So this is employees. “Did you enjoy it?” “Yeah, we enjoyed it.” “Do you prefer in person or online?” They prefer online. “Do you feel like you’re better equipped to do your job?” They’re better equipped to do their job, absolutely. “Did it help you understand your role in the overall success of the practice?” Eighty percent said yes. I think that’s a key piece.

Jen Thompson: “What did you like most about the in-person training?” In person people like, and we’ve seen this result, I was looking at the results for South Florida Ortho too this week because we’re there this week and next week doing these, and it’s pretty consistent. Everybody likes the fact that they’re able to hear stories from other employees and they’re able to interact, because we’re all so busy in what we do every day that we don’t spend time to get to know each other.

Jen Thompson: And so in the workshops, being able to have crossover amongst departments and to learn what the other departments do, and to like just meet their coworkers was a huge benefit for everybody. “What did you like about the on-demand?” This is consistent across the board. It’s convenient. It takes 10 minutes a week. That’s what we like about it. “I’m learning something. I’m able to do it on my time.” It was really consistent across the board.

Jen Thompson: All right, so what we’ve also done, as I said before, it’s a platform that we created, it’s not just a PX 2.0 train. So what we’ve also done, the platform allows Orlando Ortho just to load up any trainings that they want to load up in here. And I don’t know that you’ve taken this yet, the employee handbook. So what we did is we worked with Lisa [Leroux 00:40:12], who’s kind of the head of everything. She actually gets everything done. She’s not in here, so I can say that about her.

Jen Thompson: We took their 87-page employee manual, and we broke it into five 10-minute modules. And so now when an employee starts, every employee gets an email: “Welcome to the practice. We’re really excited to have you hear. Here’s your training.” And it walks them through the entire process of the manual. So instead of HR having to give them the manual and they sign off that they read it, now they get a certificate, and it goes into their file at the end.

Jen Thompson: So far you’ve had about 309 people have gone through that. They got 121 completed. They actually sent this out to all their employees and made them retake it. So they’re able to load that. We’re working a parking policy training now that’s kind of a fun video of where to park at the practice because their main … Sam’s laughing, but so the main parking’s in a parking garage, and people like to park close and let patients walk. So we’re doing kind of a fun video with that too, because you can add whatever you want to the platform. So we’re going to make it fun. Did I hit something that resonates with everybody finally?

Audience: Yes. [crosstalk 00:41:24].

Jen Thompson: So these are some of the other trainings that we’ve got on there. I was sitting yesterday in the session about the multi-generational workforce. That’s actually what the group is going through right now. So we’re doing training about here’s the different generations. Here’s the different generation of your coworker. Here’s what people that are 60 are like versus people that are 25 are like. This is how different patients may react.

Jen Thompson: There’s a scenario in there that talks about when you’re giving patients directions to the practice, you need to understand that somebody who’s 30 is going to receive directions different than somebody who is 70. And so it walks them through that. So that’s the one we’re going through now. One thing that we really learned is so for Patient Experience 2.0, we did it in five weeks. It was a sprint. And we were kind of learning as we went.

Jen Thompson: With this one, we’re doing it every other week, and it’s six points, six parts. So we’re doing this over the course of several months. And we’re doing a lot less prizes and things like that, but we’re still going through it, so it’s consistent. Every new employee who joins the practice, so they get their handbook training, but then a couple weeks later, it automatically sends them their PX 2.0.

Jen Thompson: And then next year, after we’ve gone through the generational, they’ll get their continuing as well. So everybody will have received the exact same training no matter where they are kind of in their life cycle of the practice. So these are some of the other trainings that we’re doing. And then I’m going to wrap it up right now.

Jen Thompson: So this is It Starts With Why. It’s a workshop that we’ve put together. And we haven’t done it with Kevin’s group, but I think we’re talking to Alicia about actually implementing it for employees and not necessarily leadership for next year, so that’ll be part of the plan that we’ll put together that you can get the doctors to approve hopefully.

Jen Thompson: But this is a four-hour facilitated workshop that we put together. And we’ve done it with South Florida Ortho, and we broke it up into two days rather than one day of four hours. It’s very intense workshop. But if you haven’t paid attention to … If you have 10 minutes, go watch the video that Simon Sinek does. Simon Sinek has a video on YouTube. It’s free, and it’s called Start With Why. It’s this whole premise of finding your purpose. So this training is all built around the Start With Why purpose.

Jen Thompson: There’s something like 20 million people have watched this video. If you don’t have time to read the book, watch the video. It’s great. It’ll give you some perspective. But that’s what this training is. So we’re just developing some more. And we’re going to incorporate it into next year. And that’s it. That’s what we did. So I appreciate you guys sitting here bright and early in the morning. I’m happy to answer any questions. But we think it’s been good. We’re continually monitoring everything that’s happened. And we just appreciate Kevin for allowing us the opportunity to put this together.

Jen Thompson: Like I was saying before, employee engagement is the new marketing. So if you’re going to do anything from a marketing perspective moving forward, focus on your people because your people are the ones that are going to do business, so [inaudible 00:44:33].

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