Newswise, December 8, 2015— A growing number of health
consumers are consulting online physician-rating sites when choosing doctors
even if the value of those sites—whether they’re reliable sources for
information, or capable of driving improvements in health care—is in dispute.
Some studies have shown how letting patients grade their
doctors can lead to over-testing and over-treatment as doctors, hoping to
improve their scores, bend to unreasonable patient demands.
But a new study in the December issue of Academic
Medicine bolsters research linking good patient satisfaction scores
with good patient outcomes. And it sheds light on another, unspoken benefit by
showing how openly sharing patient satisfaction metrics created a culture of
empathy, communication, trust and shared decision making between patients and
providers at a health system in Utah: University of Utah Health Care (UUHC).
“Everyone, from payers and policy makers to patients, yearns
for reliable, understandable information about the cost and quality of care,
and it’s our duty as the region’s sole academic medical center to respond to
that demand,” said UUHC’s CEO and the study’s lead author Vivian S. Lee, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A.
“What we
underestimated was how being transparent with our scores would be such a force
for cultural change within our organization—a catalyst for engaging physicians
in patient-centered care and the glue to further cement the physician-patient
relationship.”
The article was co-authored by UUHC’s Chief Medical Officer
Thomas Miller, M.D.; Patient Experience Director Chrissy Daniels, M.S.; former
Senior Director for Interactive Marketing and Web Brian Gresh, M.P.A; and Lee’s
predecessor Lorris A. Betz, M.D., Ph.D.
Betz was the architect of the University’s “exceptional
patient experience” initiative. Launched in 2008 with the mantra, “medical care
can only be truly great if the patient thinks it is,” the effort culminated in
2012 when UUHC became the first academic medical center in the country to put
its patient reviews online, complete with unedited comments and an accessible
five-star ranking.
The University didn’t initially set out to go public with its
scores. The goal was to improve service and patient care. In 2008, UUHC was
saddled with patient complaints about delays in the scheduling of appointments,
poor communication and lack of professionalism, among other things.
Federal
patient satisfaction scores placed the system in the 34th percentile
nationally, and its quality metrics were average compared to other teaching
hospitals.
Yet as the article states: “What began as a patient
satisfaction initiative evolved into a model for physician engagement,
values-based employment practices, enhanced professionalism and communication,
reduced variability in performance, and improved alignment of the mission and
vision across hospital and faculty group practice teams.”
Over the past seven years, patient satisfaction has markedly
increased. Half of UUHC providers now rank in the top 10 percent when compared
to their peers nationally, and 26 percent rank in the top 1 percent.
Neither the quality nor the cost of care has suffered. In
fact, for six years running UUHC has placed in the top 10 of the University
HealthSystem Consortium’s rankings, a comparison of the nation’s teaching
hospitals based on quality and safety. What’s more, UUHC has managed to bend
its cost curve even as costs nationally continue to rise.
Employee satisfaction also improved, revenue and patient volumes
are up and malpractice litigation declined, resulting in a drop in premiums.
“This has been truly transformative for our organization. Change didn’t happen
overnight, and we faced plenty of challenges,” said UUHC’s Chief Medical
Officer Tom Miller, M.D. “But we overcame the challenges, and
the solutions we devised are adaptable to other institutions.”
"Creating the Exceptional Patient Experience in One Academic
Health System" was published in Academic Medicine online on November
24, 2015
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