What We Tried

For the past 6 years, Cardiac Rehab at the University of Michigan has had a patient and family advisory board working to solve challenges that affect the program. In particular, in order to understand the “patient perspective” before starting the exercise program, the staff has held a group orientation session. Following feedback from the advisory board, changes were made to assure that rather than simply complete paperwork during the 1-hour orientation time, the focus was shifted to helping the patients develop a community and share their cardiac event stories with others in the room. Moreover, the group orientation extended to the conference room to the floor in order to help patients understand the process (e.g., they hooked an intern up to the monitors to show what the staff would be monitoring and showed the equipment and helped the group to feel comfortable on what to expect in their first session). Finally, after feedback from patients, a slide deck was created (with substantial patient creation) that would work on the social/emotional challenges that face cardiac patients. As the program continues to grow, there is an innovation to see what impact orientation might have if patients co-led orientation collaborating with exercise physiologist. The goal of this initiative is to enhance the satisfaction and understanding of patients but also to see if any of the outcome measures might change. Examples include if patients come back after orientation at higher rate, stay the entire time, graduate, or make any new friends/colleagues.