by Tony Chen

Earlier this week, I submitted that the #1 thing that we aren't talking about enough in healthcare is great patient experience stories. Jason Dinger also pondered the day when now-Google-ite YouTube would be a forum to hear memorable patient stories. Great patient stories need to be heard. In some sense, it's shocking that hospitals haven't done more of this already.

I started hospital impact to answer the question: what will it take for our hospitals to be the best run organizations on the face of the planet? More and more, I think the answer sits right at the patient. If we want great hospitals, let's find out what those great patient experiences look like, right?

So, starting next week, I would like to begin posting great patient stories here at hospital impact. I'll post the best stories I receive every Friday. If you have had a great hospital experience, or you know someone who has, please share it with us, and we'll share it with the world. What made it so great? Why was it so memorable?

Please send your great patient stories to tony[at]hospitalimpact[dot]org

I'm not doing this as some slick PR thing to pump up hospitals. Nor am I trying to minimize the fact that so many have bad or terrible experiences within hospitals. In fact, I would welcome those stories as well - we have to learn from our triumphs as well as our failures. With that being said, I just think those terrible stories are told again and again, but the great stories never seem to be shared.

Let me start this series of Great Patient Stories with Peter Gammons, one of the most beloved sports reporters of our time. After recovering from a brain aneuyrsm in June, he went back to reporting, making his first column back more about thankfulness than baseball.

"I was fortunate enough that I'd never spent much time in hospitals, so I never realized how much everyone in the medical world cares. The nurses and technicians at Brigham's were incredible. On the Cape, under the care of Dr. David Lowell, I had a speech therapist, Jeannine Annis-Young, who cut weeks off my recovery, as did my occupational therapist, Beth Kerr, and Kathleen Bobo, who got me back on the road to physical recovery. Understand, the more I came back, the more the trading deadline and pennant races drove me to distraction, which made life for nurses like Denise Meiners, Richard Erdman and Linda nearly impossible. Sorry, I have omitted dozens of names." - Peter Gammons