Imagine you’re a patient walking into a clinic for the first time — not sure where to park, maybe anxious about the visit, and the only thing on your mind is getting help.

Allison Osenar
While patient experience is often seen as what happens in our hospitals and clinics, it can start much earlier. From navigating the website to finding the right number to call, each interaction shapes how patients feel about our care and influence how likely they are to come back to UW Medicine in the future.
It’s this bigger picture — the journey patients make from their first search for care to the follow-up after they’ve left — that Allison Osenar, interim senior director for patient experience, and her team are focused on improving.
Osenar also explains how improving this journey is part of Mission Forward.
You’re running one of the new workstreams for Mission Forward — Patient and Family Experience — can you tell us about it?
One of the guiding principles of Mission Forward is that we want to ensure the delivery of high-quality patient care across our health system. We’re really focused on making sure people have a good experience whenever they’re interacting with UW Medicine. That encompasses the interactions patients and families have not only with our people but also with our systems.
We’ve created a high-level patient journey map that starts before our patients are even our patients; it starts when they’re looking for care or health information and trying to make a decision about where to go and continues through their clinic visit and ongoing relationship with UW Medicine.
What outcomes are your hoping for with the patient journey work?
Over the next few months, we’re going to work with our colleagues across UW Medicine to define the priorities under each of those steps and come up with a work plan to build the ideal patient experience, and we’ve started piloting some programs in various clinics already.
We want to make sure patients see UW Medicine as a trusted source of information and as their health partner. Our inspiration for all of this work is to create a system that supports the extraordinary care that patients appreciate as shown in this video, The Heart of Healthcare.
How is this different from the patient experience work we’ve done previously?
This workstream aims to expand on our work with patient surveys. We’re finding ways to listen to our online reputation and understand what people are saying in unsolicited venues, beyond just appointment feedback. We’re now asking the question: How do we get a holistic look at what our patients and families are experiencing at every touchpoint with UW Medicine?
We’re also trying to make it easier to get feedback from our patients. To do that, we expanded our online Patient Advisory Council.
What’s the Patient Advisory Council?
Our patient and family advisory councils are typically made up of five to 10 patients that give advice on patient-facing topics such as the experience of receiving care.
Our online council is much bigger. We have 3,000 patients enrolled, and we send them ad hoc surveys and engage them in focus groups — both in person and virtually. We’re using these results to build a database that’s accessible to anyone in UW Medicine who wants patient feedback. It’s a fantastic way to get quick perspectives on anything from onboarding procedures to finding out if it’s better to text, call or email.
You mentioned earlier that you were piloting some new programs. What are they?
We’re testing targeted improvements in 12 clinics — some in UW Medicine Primary Care, others at UW Medical Center and Harborview. There are three areas of focus: behavior standards, patient communication and team huddles.
With each pilot, we’re reviewing a variety of tactics. We want to understand the nuances: what works at a primary care clinic may not work as well at the hospital clinics. Ultimately, the goal is to figure out what works and expand to other locations. These pilots are our little laboratories.
We’ve also completed a project to make it easier for providers in our outpatient clinics to gain insights from their individual survey results about how their delivery of care is perceived. While this information was previously available in a different tool, it is now displayed as part of their Epic Dashboard, which makes it much more accessible and actionable.
What’s coming next? When can we expect some of these programs to launch?
We’re going to take the first quarter of 2025 to figure out what was successful and what we should roll out across the system. We have a few other programs, like a rounding initiative to improve the frequency that nurses and managers see patients, that are in the early stages. Improving the patient experience is always ongoing, but these feedback-based initiatives are some of the most exciting for us to continue exploring.