Does Your Hospital Need a Chief Listening Officer?

A hospital Chief Listening Officer (CLO) is an executive who’s responsible for listening to patients, healthcare practitioners, and the wider community for the purpose of improving the care process. It’s rare to see this position in U.S. healthcare organizations as listening duties are often divided and performed by other personnel, such as a Chief Experience Officer who works with patient surveys, or a Chief Marketing Officer who manages social media comments.

However, the role is gaining global recognition as a stand-alone job that can bring significant benefits to patients and providers alike. Patients who are listened to may be more satisfied with the care they receive, and feeling heard can be a healing experience in itself. Doctors and nurses working in collaboration with a CLO have the opportunity to be part of a positive movement toward increased wellbeing for patients, contributing to overall job satisfaction.

Is hiring a CLO the right move for your organization? It depends on your existing processes for soliciting and using input, and whether these processes are working. It also depends on the size of your facility and your budget. Here’s more information about the function of this role to help you make a decision. We’ll cover the reasons why a healthcare facility might add a CLO to their leadership team, the financial aspects to consider, and possible alternative strategies that could be used instead.

What Is a Chief Listening Officer Responsible For?

In general, this executive is responsible for acting as a company’s “ears” by gathering and processing insights from a range of sources. Usually, this is done as a strategy for managing branding and reputation, ensuring that the company has a system in place for analyzing and acting on customer feedback. For example, a CLO might monitor customer comments on various social media channels and respond before negative rumors escalate.

What Are a Healthcare CLO’s Primary Responsibilities?

In healthcare, the role is still being shaped. Responsibilities center around listening to patients and acting as a bridge between facility leadership, care teams, and patients. The CLO is tasked with not only gathering input, but also acting on it.

For example, a pioneering CLO in the Netherlands, Corine Jansen, not only spent a month actively listening to young-adult cancer patients at the hospital where she was employed, but also secured funding to start an online community for these patients based on the stories she heard.

Evolution of the CLO Position

For businesses in general, the role gained popularity around 2010 primarily due to the rise of social media. Companies recognized the importance of listening to customers across social channels for reasons like protecting their reputation, addressing concerns, and improving products.

An Emerging Role in Healthcare

The first CLO at a European hospital was Corine Jansen, who was given the job of listening to patients and staff at Radboud University Medical Center (Radboudumc) in 2009. Her role grew out of the hospital’s innovation center, REShape, which dealt with implementing new technology, including apps, websites, and robots.

Early on, she was asked to engage with a patient who complained that although he was receiving top medical treatment, no one was really listening to him. Her encounter with this patient gave rise to many more deep and meaningful discussions with patients, and ultimately new ways for care teams and leadership to provide support.

Her work with Radboudumc was pivotal to a hospital-wide shift toward more person-centered care, resulting in quality improvements (including decreased mortality rates) for the organization. REShape went on to host the first European Listening and Healthcare Conference in 2014. At the same time, the healthcare industry on the whole adopted many person-centered strategies. These strategies involve engaging with the patient as a human to determine their individual values and goals, rather than seeing them merely as a “patient” within a disease/treatment framework. Listening is key to providing patient-centered care.

Alternatives to Hiring a Listening Officer

Though many healthcare organizations have embraced patient-centered care, it’s still rare to find CLOs on leadership teams. The functions of listening to patients and staff are often integrated into other leadership roles, such as:

• Chief Nursing Officer
• Chief Experience Officer
• Chief Kindness Officer
• Chief Marketing Officer
• Chief Communications Officer
• Chief Wellness Officer

Financial Implications of Hiring a CLO

Reorganizing a leadership team is a significant decision with budgetary implications. Hospital CEOs are often the highest paid personnel within the organization, with top executives or large healthcare systems sometimes earning multimillion-dollar annual salaries. Chief Listening Officer qualifications, such as holding an MBA and having extensive healthcare leadership experience, place these professionals in a high salary bracket.

The reasoning behind adding a position must be strong and driven by a strategy for improvement that will lead to revenue gains that make the position sustainable.

Reasons to Consider Adding a CLO to Your Healthcare Leadership Team

Here are three indications that your healthcare organization may benefit from adding a CLO to the leadership team:

• Poor patient outcomes: High mortality rates, sentinel events, patient complaints, and low patient experience scores are indicative that current processes for taking action based on patient insights are not effective, and an improved process is needed.
• Poor staff morale: High turnover rates and low job satisfaction scores indicate problems on the staff that could be better understood and addressed through proactive listening.
• Negative reputation in the community: As in other industries, CLOs in healthcare can work with public relations and marketing teams to improve public perception of a healthcare facility.

Get More Healthcare Leadership Insights

Adding a Chief Listening Officer to your executive team could help your organization successfully shift toward providing the holistic, individualized care your patients deserve. Get more fresh ideas to help your facility thrive in our expert-written healthcare guides and resources.