Pulse 360 Pilot Program - FAQ

The PULSE (P.hysicans U.niversal L.eadership S.kills E.ducation) Survey is a “360-degree” physician/provider feedback tool that provides each feedback “Receiver” – it could be hospital leaders, physicians, providers, residents, fellows, medical students – with constructive feedback on a variety of behaviors related to leadership, teamwork, professionalism, practice and/or interpersonal and communication style. It highlights their strengths and qualities that team members appreciate as well as any improvement opportunities that would benefit the Receiver. The PULSE 360 Survey has been used over two decades in over 1200 hospitals and medical centers throughout the United States and Canada, including seven Harvard Hospitals with over one million surveys completed for 15,000+ healthcare professionals.

The PULSE 360 Program goes to great lengths to ensure the anonymity of each Rater. The Receiver will NEVER have access to a Rater’s individual responses. There are two kinds of feedback that are submitted on the PULSE Survey: A) Numeric responses – The Receiver will only receive an average score from each group on the survey questions (NO standard deviations or question response counts are EVER provided); and B) Written Comments – ALL comments go through an “Anonymity Editing” process in which they are typically merged together from all comments from all rater groups and Raters, organized into behavioral themes, spell checked, formatted into sentence case, alphabetized, and listed gerund-first ( -ing words) to ensure the anonymity of each response.

Here are other ways your anonymity is protected: A) The Receiver does NOT KNOW who responded to the survey. B) The Receiver does NOT KNOW how many Raters from each rater group have provided feedback. C) All survey responses are collected by PULSE; NO survey response data are stored in your facility’s computers. D) NO employee of your facility ever sees – or could see – your individual responses. After about 21 days, a color-coded summary report is generated with everyone’s feedback. Recipients are encouraged to review their feedback by comparing the scores across their rater groups. Almost all Recipients score themselves as part of the survey process so that they can compare their self-assessment with the perceptions of your team members, e.g., physician/provider colleagues and nursing/staff members. Here's what rater groups might look like, so you can see that it would be impossible to identify which Rater provided what feedback.:

The top five PULSE questions are then ranked based on the top five behavioral scores from EVERYONE. They are presented based on how all rater groups together (on average) scored the Receiver on that particular question. That page often looks like this:

For each question, it's important for the Receiver to understand if the ratings are in mid-range (average), better than average (green highlighted scores), or in outlying ranges (yellow or red highlighted scores). The numerical ratings on each question are presented ONLY as averages (statistical means). Again, NO standard deviations (the variability) are ever provided. The number of Raters for each question is NOT provided in the report. Here's a snippet of what the color-coded feedback might look like:

For Written Comments, we use a system called 'Anonymity Editing' as well as 'Anonymity Clustering'. This means that we spellcheck comments, correct for variations in ALL CAPS or all lowercase letters, and we capitalize the first word, so it's almost always like a sentence. We typically break down paragraphs into sentences that begin with a 'gerund' (an “-ing” word), and then we group the comments into the most frequent themes. As a Rater, you are, of course, asked NOT to type anything that would identify yourself. In summary, to help protect your anonymity, comments are generally: spellchecked, sentence case corrected (e.g., if you type in all caps or in all lowercase, they are turned into sentence case), formatted into standard grammar with a gerund first, numbered, clustered and separated into themes based on bolded keywords. Comments from ALL groups providing feedback are collapsed into one master list in order to help protect each Rater’s anonymity. The comments typically look something like this:

Bottom line: the PULSE 360 Feedback Report summary is specifically designed to protect your anonymity.

Your survey is absolutely confidential and anonymous. No one outside of the PULSE 360 Program is able to access the responses that have provided to a Receiver. For your convenience, our software is programmed with an automatic reminder system so that Raters can be notified that there is still time to complete the PULSE survey and provide valuable feedback. The PULSE automated reminder emails are electronically tied to the survey links you receive and track whether the survey for that link has been completed or not. Once you click the “Finish” button at the end of the survey, the automated reminders are stopped. The PULSE Survey reminder system is completely automated, so reminders are sent every 3 days to all Raters until we hear back from you, or the survey is completed.

Over the last 22 years, over 15,000 physicians and other healthcare professionals have received PULSE 360 Survey feedback from over 1 million surveys. The program has been used with a variety of healthcare practitioners, from medical students to residents and fellows, to nurse-practitioners and physicians assistants, to attendings and community physicians, and to physician-leaders (such as department chairs, chiefs, medical directors and chiefs of staff) and healthcare leaders (nurse-managers, administrators, and other clinical leaders). In short, almost every kind of healthcare professional has participated in PULSE 360.

The PULSE 360 Survey and feedback process is designed to help Receivers and their departments receive positive feedback about behavioral qualities about which others value and appreciate as well as to gain awareness of how they are perceived by their team members in the workplace to maximize professionalism, interpersonal communication, leadership development, and teamwork skills. The PULSE 360 can assist Receivers to develop better interpersonal behavior, teamwork, and leadership skills by identifying behaviors that others perceive as strengths as well as patterns that might benefit from improvement.

You were likely selected as a Rater by leadership or the Receiver because the Receiver has worked with you and would potentially benefit from your feedback. However, to prevent skewing of data, we recommend the “more, the merrier” approach i.e., that we recommend that as many team members as possible be invited to provide feedback. Each physician or provider must select a minimum number of Raters from each rater group which is designed to provide meaningful feedback as well as to protect each Rater’s anonymity.

You may receive multiple survey requests if a department or division is participating, or if several Receivers would like your feedback.

The PULSE 360 Survey allows the Rater to answer questions with a “Do Not Know at All” option. The more Raters who give feedback, the more robust, accurate, meaningful and helpful the summary feedback report can be. Even if you have little contact with the Receiver, rate the behaviors with which you are familiar, and your feedback can still contribute by helping a good physician become better. Please provide responses to any questions that you are able.

Your ID and passcode are only used if you need to manually enter the survey because your link is not working properly or if it was blocked by your network. Otherwise, you do not need to use the ID and passcode. Once you complete your survey request, the system will give you a thank you message, and you will be automatically logged out. All you have to do is close your internet browser when you are done.

If you did not receive a PULSE 360 Survey, it could mean that the Receivers chose other raters instead. Although our emails are “whitelisted” for your institution, it is possible that you may have usual privacy filters on your computer (for example, if you are using your personal computer to access the PULSE survey email), it may be screening out emails from pulsesurvey@pdpflorida.com, so you will want to check your Junk or Spam folders.

If you have any questions, please refer to the “heads up” email from your facility’s leadership or reach out to PULSE directly by going to https://www.pulse360program.com and then click on the blue “Contact Us” button on the right side of our website’s landing page.