Burning Platform
Starting in 2012, Medicare will examine patient satisfaction scores when reimbursing hospitals, with best performing hospitals winning out on the incentive. Incomplete solutions flooding the market focus on enhancing eight patient satisfaction measures through scripting to improve bedside manner. What’s needed is a total rethinking of patient satisfaction that leverages the patient’s social network, healthcare history and game mechanics to create connected provider/patient relationships as part of protocol. Welcome the era of Patient Kinetics—a turnkey social solution to patient satisfaction.
ESI’s Healthcare’s Patient Kinetics™ Approach
Current patient satisfaction initiatives focused on the patient experience do not leverage individual profiling or social networking to boost satisfaction and clinical/financial results. The emphasis to ascertain the patient experience broken down in individual elements of care does not address the most essential element from which to derive optimum care and experience. Because patient assessment process is solely clinical in nature, it fails to establish the true expectations of the individual/patient or to create a bond or connection to the provider. Ironically, in all the information derived today, there is no indication as to what is important to the patient, what their chief concerns are, who their influencers and decision-makers are, nor what has been the patient’s historical experience good and bad related to prior hospitalizations and healthcare needs.
ESI Healthcare’s “Patient Kinect™” software program profiles and captures the mindset of the patient captured as part of the Patient Kinetics™ proprietary methodology and process, which leverages the patient’s social network and integrates personal and historic information not traditionally found within the electronic medical record (EMR) to provide a turnkey software solution for use by all healthcare providers.
In closing, the case for focusing on the patient’s experience and working out how best to intervene for improvement is a given for each and every organization. Hospitals and their respective delivery networks have a moral and human imperative to protect people when they are weak and vulnerable, and to strive toward recovery and healing as a means of ensuring the humanity of care. The need to do so within complex systems and institutions remains under significant pressure to increase efficiency and throughput, which will remain a fundamental challenge.
It further signals the importance of finding sustainable and enduring solutions. This monumental task can only be dealt with as long as a healthcare organization is truly committed to the aspect of caring about their patients and not just caring for their patients. The Patient Kinetics™ methodology and processes now provide the means to efficiently and effectively do this.
Individual uniqueness is fundamental in creating relationships that exceed the anxiety and fear related to human suffering. Those organizations that embrace this change will find significant momentum shifts in the morale of their people, and the reputation and loyalty of their organizations within the communities they serve.
