Quality Improvement of Healthcare

Healthcare is a very delicate industry. Patients are placed at the centre of the industry and need to be treated with utmost care. Hospitals are built and doctors trained all with the single aim of ensuring the patient is well taken care of and the effects on the budget are not bulging. Therefore, patient care in hospitals needs to be optimized to ensure the efficient delivery of services that are both effective in caring for the patient, and affordable enough for the patient not as to put a strain on the patient’s resources.

Problem statement

In America, at least 20% of the patients are readmitted within thirty days of discharge. This readmission has a cost of approximately 17 billion dollars on the healthcare budget. Readmission of patients is mainly caused by nonadherence to the guidelines and directives such as the medication and dosages, and the importance of PCP follow-up appointments. All these factors coupled up with unnecessary pressures ensure the patient does not fully recover and therefore leading to readmission. Patient engagement has been characterised as a tool for effective patient care because it guarantees reduced rates of readmission in hospitals.

Importance of the Quality Improvement Initiative

Patient engagement refers to interactions made with patients before, during and after they have been treated and subjected to care. It involves a variety of aspects such as follow-up calls, education of the patient on the medications and dosages. Also, educating the patient on importance of PCP follow-ups is a critical aspect of patient engagement. Patient engagement ensures the patient can determine the results of clinical processes and disclose them to the healthcare provider. Therefore, reducing the need for many tests.

Patient engagement reduces the cost of healthcare provision by a wide range. As seen above, the cost of readmission to hospitals is staggeringly high and therefore causes the patients to incur more money in their treatment of certain diseases. However, if the patient is actively engaged by the healthcare provider, the cost fo healthcare is likely to reduce considerably. This will make healthcare affordable to many people.

Patient engagement has benefits for the patients as well. When a patient is well engaged, they are likely to adhere and comply with the medications and dosages better than when they were not engaged. Also, the no-shows for check-ups and treatments reduce significantly for the patient. The patient responds actively to marketing programs and outreach by the healthcare provider because there has been constant communication and engagement. All these benefits improve the outcome of the care process in the patient.

For the healthcare provider, benefits of patient engagement are also substantial. The provider can provide a better cost management in the care of patients and this will ensure the patient is treated at the best affordable cost. Also, the care resources the provider avails are better utilized by the patient and reduces wastage o many precious resources and even the time of physicians who would have been used to care for other patients. Overall, patient engagement increases the employee and client satisfaction for healthcare providers.

Support for Patient Engagement

According to Barello et al., (2016), cuts in health funds and competitions fo the limited budgets has necessitated hospitals running towards efficacy and efficiency. Hospitals are now sprinting I search of a much more affordable way of caring for patients. The way needs to be efficient an minimize wastage of resources. All this can be achieved by engaging with the patients on a level of understanding. The engagement should spiral from a desire to reduce risk and a need to improve the patient care outcomes. All these have necessitated research on the importance of patient engagement (Barello et al., 2016). eHealth is used in patient engagement to promote responsible health management among the patients. Therefore, ensuring that patients who are responsible for their health and well engaged can obtain positive outcomes than patients who are not.

Patients need to be treated more as research companions and not subjects. A paradigm shift needs to normalise the patient’s role in research and treatment efficiency. The patient is more than just a subject, he or she is a critical research partner and needs to be engaged for efficient treatment outcome and output (Manafo et al., 2018). Engaging the patient leads to positive opportunities for the patient, researcher, and healthcare provider to increase the healthcare outcomes together (Manafo et al., 2018). Patient engagement will better address the critical healthcare reforms required for key areas in the healthcare industry because of their deep and diverse understanding fo the services they need delivered.

Patient engagement is characterised as the key driver toward sustainable and equitable healthcare systems. However, it is more than evident that patient engagement is a very daunting and challenging task. For meaningful patient engagement to develop in an institution, the stakeholders need to comprehend the requisite value of patient engagement (Carroll et al., 2017). However, the process itself is not easy and contains numerous challenges. There exists a lack of clarity on what entails patient engagement and how patient engagement can eb efficiently implemented in an organization (Carroll et al., 2017). Patient engagement is a challenging task because of the time needed to develop and implement it.

Steps Necessary for the Improvement

Improving patient engagement in a healthcare facility is not an easy task. It is a very challenging fact that requires a lot of effort and courage.  Implementing patient engagement is not easy because it requires time. This requires the physician to create time and follow up on the patients. However, the physicians are already strained of time as it is and requiring them to strain their time further is a very daunting affair. Therefore, time application is one of the challenges of implementing a patient engagement system.

To improve the service delivery of a healthcare system by patient engagement, the provider needs to take advantage of the available nurses. Nurses are good speakers; they relate extraordinarily well with the patients and have been long tasked with ensuring the patient follows up on medication and treatment is administered on the patient. Therefore, nurses can be used to implement the patient engagement because of their good communication and extraordinary relations with the patients.

To successfully implement a patient engagement system, a healthcare provider should create a dedicated call centre with specially trained nurses for receiving and making calls. The nurses should be tasked with making follow-up calls on patients and ensuring the patient is well educated on the process of treatment. This education will involve the medication and dosages and the importance of the PCP follow-ups. Also, the calls can be used to record the patients review of the services offered to the institution.

Evaluation fo Patient Engagement

Patient engagement leads to a decrease in the cost fo healthcare system and a decrease in the rate of readmission. To determine the effect of patient engagement, the author sets the following hypothesis tests; the average patient readmissions within thirty days of discharge is less than 20% of the total patients discharged. This hypothesis will be considered proved if the total number of patients readmitted is less than 20% of those who have been discharged within thirty days. This hypothesis is important because it shows the effectiveness of patient engagement in dealing with the problem affecting many people.

Also, this improvement can be evaluated through surveys administered by the healthcare provider. The surveys can be given to the patients and they should be asked to rate the service delivery and quality fo the services they are offered with. Also, to assess the importance of this improvement, one needs to ask the patients in the survey whether they appreciate their treatment methods after the patient engagement. This should be done with a control group of people who have not been subjected to patient engagement.

Conclusion

Patients suffer through a lot fo problems to undergo readmission and even to pass through treatment without understanding whatever they are going through. Patient engagement is designed to cater for this deficiency and assess the importance of creating a fully-fledged system where the patient effectively understands the treatment they are being subjected to and they can effectively manage their own health.

References

Barello, S., Triberti, S., Graffigna, G., Libreri, C., Serino, S., Hibbard, J., & Riva, G. (2016). eHealth for Patient Engagement: A Systematic Review. Front Psychol, 6, 2013. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.02013

Carroll, S., Embuldeniya, G., Abelson, J., McGillion, M., Berkesse, A., & Healey, J. (2017). Questioning patient engagement: research scientists’ perceptions of the challenges of patient engagement in a cardiovascular research network. Patient Prefer Adherence, 11, 1573–1583. https://doi.org/10.2147/ppa.s135457

Manafo, E., Petermann, L., Mason-Lai, P., & Vandall-Walker, V. (2018). Patient engagement in Canada: a scoping review of the ‘how’ and ‘what’ of patient engagement in health research. Health Res Policy Syst, 16(1), 5–11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-018-0282-4