Wednesday, November 21, 2018

Healthcare and Patient Satisfaction – The Essential Elements

The success or failure of any organization depends on the quality of service they provide to the customers. In case of healthcare organizations, patient satisfaction is of prime concern. These establishments work day-in and day-out to improve the quality of patient service, provide exceptional patient care, and enhance the patient experience.
Quality of Service is Indicated by Patient Experience Measures
Patient satisfaction surveys play a very important role in assisting healthcare institutions to transition to value-based healthcare services. Recent research states that quality of care is directly influenced by patient experience. But, in spite of various factors influencing organizations to pay more attention to patient satisfaction, many healthcare providers are still skeptical about it due to conflicting research. Some studies state that patient experience has no relation with the quality of care, while other studies found that it is directly associated with better outcomes.
Major Factors Influencing the Patient Experience of Care
Even though there are many inconsistencies in terms of defining patient experience, research states that improvement in patient experience and development in quality of care are clearly connected. There are five major procedures that can help healthcare organizations in radically improving patient experiences and utilizing innovative technology to their advantage.
Proper Monitoring of Patient Satisfaction and Implementation of Appropriate Measures
Improving patient experience is a basic and necessary approach towards improving outcomes. If a patient is given proper treatment and is receiving proper care from the doctors and nurses, then they will feel better about the hospital authority. As a result, they will properly follow the treatment recommendations. Institutions should use patient satisfaction as a balance measure, and not as a catalyst for outcomes. Balance measures assist health systems in making proper quality of care improvements and also taking care of potential negative impacts. Using patient experience as balance measure also helps healthcare institutions make sure that improvements one area doesn’t hamper another area.
Evaluation of the Complete Care Team  
A major step towards the improvement of patient care experience is to gather data as a whole instead of gathering information about individual care interactions. Surveys should be conducted to assess not only individuals, but also the entire team. They should include individual oriented questions along with questions that concern the entire team, like ‘how well were the nurses and physicians working together’, and so on.     
Judicious Utilization of Healthcare Analytics
Systems have to understand, use, and act on the patient satisfaction data to improve the patient experience. Concerned authorities can use an enterprise data warehouse and patient experience applications to research and identify how patient experience, clinical outcomes, and employee satisfaction are related.

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