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Dialogue: Kate Reed, VP of Ambulatory Services

Kate Reed

What is your main goal in Ambulatory?
To provide the very best experience to patients who come here to see our providers. That encompasses customer service as well as being respectful and inclusive of our referring physicians.

Children’s provides some of the best healthcare available. Why is customer service important?
People won’t come here just because we have some of the world’s best doctors and nurses. I have four adopted children and three of them have special needs, so I know that healthcare is not just about whether the nurse was caring and the doctor was technically proficient. If a parent can’t get through on the phone, or get an appointment for six months, or if someone was rude to them, that’s all part of the experience and the impression that they’re going to leave here with. Learning from our inpatient colleagues, we know family-centered care actually improves outcomes. It’s not just window-dressing. I am passionate about making our customer service every bit as world-class as our patient care, and that means ensuring that our caring is evident and pervasive from the very first interaction.

What does customer service encompass?
Our first customer service focus is to make each patient/family experience as good as it can be. Many people think that customer service training is just “smile training.” It’s much more than that. Imagine you’re a mom with a sick child. You’ve been stuck on Longwood in traffic and are now a half hour late for the appointment, so you’re worried you won’t be able to see the doctor, and you’re frightened about what the doctor might tell you. You’re trailing two other kids and pushing a stroller, and you can’t remember if you’re supposed to turn left, right, or upside down. So customer service is teaching people to appreciate what a stressful experience it is to bring your child to a hospital, and to notice when somebody’s lost and take them where they need to go—to focus on the family’s whole experience here.

“ I am passionate about making our customer service every bit as world-class as our patient care, and that means ensuring that our caring is evident and pervasive from the very first interaction.”

Our second focus is working closely with our referring physicians to make sure they aren’t left out of the care team. They are vital, but we haven’t always treated them that way. We’re very fortunate that they keep sending their patients here, so we’re doing a lot to tell referring physicians that we value their time, our relationship with them, their medical perspective, and that we see this as a collaborative care arrangement. We’re trying to make it easier for them to refer patients, get information, and link to educational and clinical conferences. We’ve still got a lot of work to do, but we’re moving in the right direction.

What is the most important initiative you’ve implemented?
The Ambulatory leadership team has worked really hard to develop business, front end, and customer service standards and scorecards that help us measure how well we are delivering on our commitments. The leadership team has worked tirelessly to help its staff build the skills they need so we all perform at a consistently high level. Staff and managers help each other, but also compete with each other to see which teams can do the best on our various scorecards. I believe that if you give people data about their performance and show them how it compares to other departments, they will want to improve.

What is the biggest challenge you face?
We’ve made many changes and have had a demonstrable impact on customer service, but we still have an access problem.

Part and parcel of having the world’s best clinicians and services is that they are in very high demand, and in some of our specialties, we just can’t keep up. For instance, Neurology has added pediatric neurologists and increased its visit volume eight percent in each of the past two years, but the wait time to see a neurologist can still be as long as nine months. If you have a child who has just been diagnosed with ADHD, you’re panicked and want the very best help available. Is ADHD life-threatening? No. But it sure feels like a pretty big family tragedy, and nine months to see a doctor seems like forever. In Neurology and many other services we’re trying to add providers as fast as we can, but some are in short supply, so the demand will continue to outstrip us.

Another access challenge for us is caring for patients who have multi-faceted problems. For these patients, who need to see a number of different providers, we try to coordinate the visits the child needs so they come in once to see all of their specialists.

How can we accommodate the growth of the Ambulatory programs?
We are trying to increase our presence in satellite locations so patients can access all the physicians they see here, but closer to home. Our current satellite locations have been wildly popular, so we plan to add a couple new satellites to better serve families in Eastern Massachusetts. We also need to move some of our Ambulatory services away from the Longwood Medical area. Perpetually congested traffic, a shortage of parking, and a severe shortage of space have led us to explore an additional Ambulatory campus, probably in Brookline or Chestnut Hill.

What do you like about working here?
We have such a wonderful mission taking care of children. It grabbed me 25 years ago when I was a nurse here in the NICU and continues to have a strong grip on me. I see all these sweet, hurting, trusting little faces and can’t imagine that working anywhere else could ever be as meaningful.