Your organisation is patient-centric? I wouldn’t be so sure…

I had a privilege to visit and explore healthcare organisations in more than 20 countries around the world, as well as an opportunity to engage countless vendors supporting them, mostly from IT perspective. One of the persistent themes when discussing these organisations and supporting products is always patient-centricity.

We all take pride in being patient-centric, either as care providers or as vendors of solutions design to support the care process.

However, when talking about patient-centricity, I believe that we cannot look at it as ‘yes’ or ‘no’ characteristic. I prefer to ask, “On scale from one to ten how patient-centric are you?” That usually causes a bit of silence.

Of course, in every hospital and in every solution, design to support it, will have some level of consideration for patient when defining their organisation and processes, but can we all do more?

Patient centricity is not a tick in a box.

Care providers and relevant vendors cannot just proclaim patient centricity and continue with business as usual.

It is not enough to say, “We put patient at the heart of everything we do”, but forget about him/her as soon as he/she leaves our department.

• Do they know what happens to the patient when he/she is not within the four walls of their hospital?
• Do they make him/her walk around from department to department, to see different consultants, or come back three times for three services?
• Does each department have their own variation of processes and information captured?
• Do they align between primary, hospital and social care?
• Is patient informed and engaged in every step of care?

In my experience, most of the hospitals are better described as organisation-centric, with various gravity areas around the different units and departments. IT solutions supporting them are typically designed to maintain this set-up and not to challenge it.

Here is how I imagine health system for mine self-defined patient centricity score of 10/10:

• Different areas of organisations are fully coordinated on services, appointment, information and documentation sharing, no overlap, no delay between the different points of care.
• There is a full alignment with primary and social care to make sure that appropriate services are scheduled and deliver at the time and place best suited for the patient and not for the organisation convenience.
• All relevant parties for the patient share information real time and synchronise all patient related activities to minimise the time, effort, risk and inconvenience for the patient.
• From the position of parking lot to the check-in and internal architecture of the building, everything is tailored to bring information and services to patient.
• Perhaps most importantly, supporting IT solutions are designed around engaging the patient not just documenting what is being done to patient. Patient cannot be a passive object on which we perform some services, but is in driving position and empowered to manage his/her care.

Of course, we can all come up with very good reasons why this cannot be achieved, and talk about all bureaucratic, financial, legal, technical limitations etc. However, we need to be aware that lack of the before mentioned standards is causing harm to the patients and wasting many of the limited resources in the process.

I guess that most of us will never live to see fully patient centric health system, but we need to keep pushing toward this state. Changing our current average score of probably 4-5/10 to 7-8/10, will make a whole world of difference both for the outcomes and for the dignity of the patients, and has potential to make significant reduction of waste and redundancies in the system. There are organisations out there well under way on this journey, and we should learn from them – e.g. Catalonia region in Spain, or Kaiser Permanente in US.

Being patient centric is a mindset, it cannot be restricted to a project. We may never get to the perfectly patient-centred system, but we certainly can and need to go in that direction.