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Resources > Blogs > Engaging Patients in Hourly Rounding: Improving the Patient and the Caregiver Experience

Engaging Patients in Hourly Rounding: Improving the Patient and the Caregiver Experience

Thursday, February 26, 2015
Co-author: Greg Berney, Senior Manager of Patient Experience at Cone Health
Several months ago, a Patient Experience Manager at Cone Health was rounding with a nurse on a med/surg department. We’ll call him “James.” As James discussed different patient experience improvement tactics, he verbalized a concern with hourly rounding logs. “Each time I put my initials on that log I feel frustration with leadership because it feels like they don’t trust me.” Leaders, in turn, felt frustrated because the logs were their only way of ensuring hourly rounding was happening.

While James identified a lack of trust as his main frustration, this also articulates a greater challenge in improving the Patient Experience: ensuring our goals and how we motivate caregivers to meet those goals match. As James would tell you, there is nothing about writing his initials on a log sheet that help him provide better care at the bedside. In fact, the log sheet introduces a new goal and motivation for many caregivers - fill it out faithfully and you won’t be hassled by your boss! Hourly Rounding had become a task for James instead of a tool that to provide better care.

How can we tap into caregivers’ natural motivation, and partner with patients, to improve the patient and caregiver experiences at the same time?

At Cone Health, Hourly Rounding was re-launched with a specific focus on helping caregivers understand what’s in it for them. The entire training is around helping each nurse proactively communicate to their patients in a way that ends up reducing call lights.

The best part: patients who hit their call light less frequently tend to do so because they feel their needs are being met!

Engaging Patients In the Process

Instead of using rounding logs to validate their process, Cone has added a question to the Patient Perception of Care survey specifically asking the patient if a nurse came in the room every hour.  Additionally, some patients give this feedback in real time by keeping their own log sheet of which staff members came in the room and when.  

Patient tracking provides added patient engagement benefits that aren’t available through traditional tracking methods:
  • Patients automatically have a better understanding of the processes, which reduces anxiety or fear about being in pain or being forgotten.
  • This allows patients to more naturally partner with caregivers to ensure their needs are met on a mutually convenient schedule.
  • Staff have additional motivation to explain the purpose and process of rounding.  
One could easily view Hourly Rounding as a transactional task - something that we do to patients. Instead, engaging patients creates a more interactional model in which patients are informed and empowered.  In this way, patient engagement leads to improved caregiver experience as well.  


Greg Berney is the Senior Manager of Patient Experience at Cone Health in Greensboro, NC where he addresses organizational Patient Experience and Patient Engagement opportunities from problem identification through innovation, planning, and execution of improvement initiatives. Greg provides project management and consultation for an organization of 6 inpatient hospitals and 100+ emergency, ambulatory and outpatient areas in close collaboration with senior administrative and physician leadership.  Greg’s recent speaking engagements include the Beryl Institute Patient Experience Conference, Dignity Health’s Patient Experience Summit, and the NextGen Patient Experience Summit. Follow Greg on Twitter at @gregberney.
Tags: patient engagement, communication, rounding, employee engagement
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