Using Patient and Family Advisory Councils to Drive Patient Satisfaction

Patients across the country are directly contributing to their care by joining Patient and Family Advisory Councils (PFAC), which bring patients, providers, and operational staff together to improve the patient experience. Advisory councils work on improvement projects for topics ranging from LGBTQ healthcare to ethics to cardiac care, using feedback from their patient advisors to drive change.

At Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, these councils have been an integral part of continuous improvement since 2007, and they even helped select Epic as the organization’s EHR.

“The advances [PFACs] have driven have made us better than we could have been on our own. We believe this is the future of patient-centered care,” said Maureen Fagan, BWH’s executive director for the Center for Patients and Families.

Based on their experience with PFACs, Brigham and Women’s has outlined best practices that other healthcare organizations can use to form their own Patient and Family Advisory Councils.

Read about Brigham and Women’s best practices here and their PFAC philosophy here.