Sustainability report

Patient experience & voice

  • GRI 103-1: Management Approach
  • GRI 103-2: Management Approach
  • GRI 103-3: Management Approach
  • GRI 413-2: Operations with significant impacts on local communities

Edwards Lifesciences’ work to improve Patient Experience and Voice supports our aspiration of transforming patient lives with breakthrough medical technologies. As one of Edwards’ most important topics, we continue to evolve our program to better meet the needs of our patients. Understanding the patient experience and listening to patient voices strengthens our innovation, production, and delivery of solutions to help those fighting cardiovascular disease.

Definition

Continuously improving the patient experience with products developed with feedback and input from patients while empowering patients to support and aid each other.

Management approach

Patient experience and voice is one of our most important topics—excelling in being a patient-first culture is consistent with our Credo and enhances patients’ lives. Edwards Lifesciences focuses on providing patient-focused innovations that save and enhance patient lives. We understand that, unfortunately, too often patients do not have influence over the diagnosis of their condition, the type of treatment they receive or how their care is delivered.

In Our Aspirations, we set forth to “Ensure that our therapies are addressing the needs of patients through an increasingly collaborative patient engagement process.” Our work in this area aligns to SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being, in particular sub-target 3.4 that says, “by 2030, reduce by one third premature mortality from non-communicable diseases through prevention and treatment and promote mental health and well-being.”

Edwards became the first medical device company in the world to establish a formal patient engagement function designed to lead and empower everyone in the company to engage with, learn from and support patients and their families to improve the healthcare experience. We lead our industry in best practices, including being the first medical device company to publish global guidance on how and why we work with patient organizations. This helps provide disclosure and transparency into our relationships that could generate concerns or criticisms for conflicts of interest.

Our CEO has a performance management objective (PMO) tied to increasing employee exposure to patients. This promotes a strong culture consistent with the Credo and our Aspirations. The Vice President of Patient Engagement is responsible for ensuring that all patient engagement activities are aligned with our Aspirations to transform patient care through innovative technologies and to attract and engage talented employees. Our global Patient Engagement team designs activities to better incorporate the patient perspective into our business strategy. We enable meaningful patient-driven innovation by authentically empowering patients, advocates and healthcare stakeholders to widen access to treatments and transform quality of life.

Evidence indicates that empowered, engaged patients experience better clinical outcomes. For this reason, Edwards’ Patient Engagement function maintains and consistently updates an approach to empowering patients, including sponsoring patient listening sessions, conducting Science of Patient Input (SPI) studies, supporting patient advocacy groups that represent the patient’s voice and helping patients exercise their voices to improve the healthcare system.

Growing the patient voice through support of patient-focused organizations

When patients use their voices, they do more than advocate for themselves—they inspire others to speak up and support each other in working toward healthier outcomes. We believe in the work undertaken by patient advocacy groups and we are proud to support those organizations through resource sharing and charitable contributions.

Edwards Lifesciences Foundation provides charitable grants to the American Heart Association for their Heart Valve Ambassador Program, which connects heart valve patients to a group of dedicated individuals who offer resources and support, as well as the Heart Valve Education Center, where patients can connect with and learn from other patients. This connection opportunity is critical to patient comfort levels and therapy adoption. Our Foundation also supports Heart Valve Voice – a patient- focused advocacy organization that collects and shares patient stories and advocates on behalf of patients’ interests. This investment is only a small part of a growing global program among heart valve patient organizations that reaches patients in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland, Italy, Germany, France, Japan, Australia and several other countries.

The Foundation supports several patient advocacy programs. The WomenHeart: National Coalition for Women with Heart Disease and Heart Champions program has immense reach globally, with 18 million instances of disease awareness. In addition, the Foundation supports the Mended Hearts Trained Accredited Patient Visitor Program and Mended Hearts Peer Advocate program and the Patient Advocate Foundation’s Heart Valve CareLine and Financial Aid Fund.

The Patient Experience

Our annual Patient Experience event brings together patients and caregivers in multiple Edwards locations around the world to connect and share their experiences with our employees and other patients. Through this program, Edwards gains important insights into the patient journey, from symptoms and diagnosis through treatment and recovery, as well as the patient concerns and challenges along the way. Despite the challenges presented during the pandemic, we were able to expand our program reach, discussed further in the Annual Performance section.

This approach supports our goal to ensure that our therapies are addressing the needs of patients through an increasingly collaborative patient engagement process. This goal aligns to SDG 3: Good Health & Well-Being.

Addressing patient needs and connection along the journey to heart health

Edwards strives to ensure all patients have a voice in shaping their treatment experience, and we recognize that many patients benefit from minimally invasive procedures. To increase access to minimally invasive procedures, Edwards drives innovation in Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR) technology. TAVR allows physicians to replace heart valves with a catheter instead of surgically opening the chest. To learn more about patient experiences with Edwards’ heart valves, browse our collection of patient stories.

Our Edwards PatientConnect program extends our support for patients beyond their TAVR procedure, empowering them through information, resources and opportunities to participate in peer support, educational programs and advocacy. By cultivating a community of patients who want to stay informed and to share their experience with others, together we are improving the lives of people living with heart valve disease.

In recent years, Edwards advanced its efforts to bring data representing the patient perspective into various stages of product development, including input from patients into early-stage product development and acquisition decision-making, regulatory decisions and health technology assessments. Edwards places a priority on gathering patient insights across the total product lifecycle, so we invest in patient preference studies among various patient groups to determine the benefit-risk trade-offs for new therapies. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, Edwards ensures the patient voice is heard from development to commercialization of new technologies.

Patient resources

Edwards believes informed patients have a more successful treatment experience. We continue to focus on raising patient awareness and ensuring patients have the resources and access to the therapies they need. To read more about our educational initiatives for better care and our work to improve access, please see our Annual Performance in the Access to Healthcare section.

Our website offers information on heart valve disease and treatment, as well as FAQs and a glossary of terminology. Additionally, our NewHeartValve website provides comprehensive information on aortic stenosis and options for treatment. Our Foundation also invests in educational resources for patients with Mended Hearts, the American Heart Association and with the Alliance for Aging Research.

Patient Voice in Product Design & Development

Edwards works to incorporate patients’ input into every stage of our product development. By listening to patients and capturing their input through both qualitative and quantitative methods, we can provide care that meets individual needs and preferences. From early-stage product design, to early feasibility studies and clinical trials, integrating patient input makes our products more effective. This aligns with our Aspiration to ensure that our therapies are addressing the needs of patients through an increasingly collaborative patient engagement process and we will continue to evolve how patient input is integrated in product development.

We look to continue investment in the development of quantitative data to evaluate the relative importance and value of products through the eyes of the patient community. We are the first medical devices company to develop and publicly publish these studies, leading the charge in improving the patient experience. Our most recent work studied patient preferences when choosing between aortic stenosis (AS) treatments, taking into account the risk-benefit analysis that is done when choosing between two surgical replacements. The study focused on the patient experience and how they weigh the decision on what surgical replacement to pursue, which informs Edwards’ approach in product development in the future.

Annual performance

Patient engagement and events

As a result of COVID-19, we converted our 2020 Patient Experience to a virtual model, allowing employees to safely engage with patients through videoconferencing. While the experience was not as rewarding to participants as our in-person event, the virtual format allowed for more employees to participate, resulting in more employees hearing patient stories and nearly doubling year-over-year employee exposure to patients. We look forward to expanding this to a “hybrid” in-person and virtual experience, providing the high-quality connection of the in-person meetings with the expanded access for our global employee base.

Elevating partnerships focused on patient voice

Throughout 2020, our partners found new, creative ways to continue their work in amplifying patient voice. COVID-19 provided unique opportunities to grow partnerships as these organizations reached even more patients:

  • Through a grant from Edwards, Mended Hearts quickly trained their peer-support ambassadors to provide support to heart valve patients online, expanding their ability to reach more patients than prior years (typically, ambassadors connected with other patients in the hospital or over the phone)
  • Under a grant from Edwards, Heart Valve Voice (US), the Global Heart Hub and scores of patient organizations worked to reach patients through social and earned media to educate them on the dangers of avoiding heart disease care in the pandemic
  • Patient organizations supported through general grants from Edwards advocated for public policies to allow for telehealth reimbursement

Consistently embedding patient focus across Edwards

As Edwards continues to grow our business and expand across the globe, we consider it a top priority to maintain a consistent patient-focused culture. We recognize that patient engagement provides a powerful sense of purpose in our work for many of Edwards’ employees, and we continue to prioritize facilitating these connections.

In addition to maintaining consistency in our patient-focused culture across geographic locations, we also standardize our approach to managing patient engagement from a corporate level. In 2020, one effort is our newly created Patient Support Center, which acts as a centralized place to collect, organize and address any patient inquiries received by Edwards. The Center was initially set up to provide rapid response to incoming patient phone and email inquiries but has since provided Edwards with early insights into patient concerns and questions regarding COVID-19. In addition, this provided Edwards the ability to develop dynamic educational materials to ease patients’ concerns about transmission. To read more about the Patient Support Center, please see the highlight story.

Our aspirations

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Transforming patient lives with breakthrough medical technologies

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Fostering an inclusive culture where all employees grow and thrive

Material topics
Highlight story

Edwards’ Patient Support Center Provides Rapid Response to Patient Inquiries

To support Edwards’ strategy of patient-focused innovation, the company decided in 2019 to develop a comprehensive response system to the increasing volume of incoming patient inquiries. As the company has grown rapidly in its reputation for patient-focused products, particularly its Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement system, public inquiries and questions about its products have increased substantially. To meet this demand, the company created a centralized Patient Support Center (PSC) to provide compassionate, full-service support that contributes to a consistent, positive patient experience across Edwards. The PSC was designed to:

  • Provide one point of contact for timely support and resolution of questions/concerns
  • Deliver unique patient journey through a continual data feedback loop
  • Mitigate reputation risk by promptly de-escalating potential complaints or other issues
  • Utilize metrics to inform business needs

As the PSC was put into place over the course of 2020, it provided our incoming patient inquiries with a timely and comprehensive conclusion to their interaction with Edwards. In addition, the PSC:

  • Provided all incoming inquiries with <24-hour turnaround and regular updates as the inquiry was being resolved
  • Completed most (70%) patient inquiries in one interaction – an 80% improvement from 2019
  • Provided patients a “one-stop-shop,” with easy access in phone, email and web channels
  • Provide an early warning system of patient interest/activity for “hot” topics.  This produced, for example, quick-response COVID-19 web materials, providing concerned patients with easy answers and quickly de-escalating potential risks of concern
  • Produced management monthly reports with early insights into the types and forms of information that patients need to make healthcare decisions

As Edwards expands the PSC to provide increasingly high-quality patient interactions, the company expects to continue to improve the patient experience and ensure Edwards is delivering patient-focused innovation.