Metrics in healthcare to be focussed on improving patient experience?

Leading with passion as champions of change will imbibe a culture of ownership in the medical and paramedical personnel. Quality is the responsibility of everyone starting from the governance to the staff at the lowermost rung of the ladder in a healthcare organization

Metrics or key performance indicators (KPI) in healthcare as mandated by several accreditation bodies help only when they are patient centric ultimately driven towards improved patient care.Quality improves only when the processes are not redundant and improvement is visible .It is often seen that metrics are captured only for documentation rather than being the vehicles for improvement in patient care

A simple way of benchmarking the processes in the system e.g. turnaround time for a lab test,patient waiting; time for consultation,waiting time in the emergency department. A detailed mapping of the workflow in a process often helps .For e.g. at the lab reception, system generated patient instructions along with the bill might expedite the testing as would a message. Similarly,reminder by the front office executive a day before the appointment for a follow up visit for a chronic condition and organizing for the labs ordered by the clinician may help the patient spend quality time with the clinician.

This can be largely put to use through effective deployment of technology.Many hospitals or healthcare facilities invest on information systems but without sufficient knowledge about the servers, bandwidth etc as a result of which services suffer.There is an imminent need for creating awareness about healthcare Information technology and leveraging its potential to the maximum to improve patient care .As of now, this is available to few big organizations in the country because of the cost involved.Further planning for robust data security and putting the data to meaningful use by using data analytics to arrive at meaningful decisions is the need of the hour .

Healthcare in India with its vast patient population is set to innovate and improve the processes and we all need to contribute our bit and participate in the revolution.