Questioning Protocol – Engaging patients in a changing healthcare system
Engaging Patients in a
Changing Health Care
System
Christine Schaefer
In the Baldrige Health Care Criteria for Performance Excellence, the Customer Focus category (category 3) asks how your organization engages its patients and other customers for long-term marketplace success. The related self-assessment questions cover how your organization listens to the voice of the customer, builds relationships with patients and other customers, and uses patient and other customer information to improve and to identify opportunities for innovation.
As the U.S. health care system undergoes major changes, what are some effective practices for engaging patients in new and challenging contexts?
I recently spoke with a Baldrige examiner who responds to that question by drawing on both her professional expertise in business management and her personal experiences as the mother of a patient navigating the health care system for multiple surgeries.
Randi Redmond Oster is now in her second year on the Baldrige Program’s Board of Examiners. For more than a decade, she was an engineer and executive with GE Capital. She specialized in new business development and earned Black Belt Six Sigma certification. Oster later applied her business knowledge and skills in her role as a patient advocate for her son as he underwent numerous surgeries.
During those experiences, Oster saw numerous opportunities for health care providers to better engage patients and their families through information and tools to empower them. Today she works to educate hospitals and others on how to address such opportunities; she also has shared her insights in a book she wrote on empowering health care consumers.
When Oster works with health care organizations now, she says she “helps them understand the patient perspective today and ways they can move forward by being responsive to the dynamic change that is happening.”
She pointed out three key developments that have changed the ways that health care organizations must focus on customers today:
Consumers have higher deductibles. “Because they’re spending more money, they’re asking more questions,” Oster observed.
Consumers have access to more data on the performance of health care organizations and employees; for example, the Hospital Compare tool on the Medicare.gov site allows consumers to compare organizations on patient satisfaction measures.
Consumers are exposed via news outlets and social media interactions to negative health outcomes via stories about medical procedures. This creates a challenge for the health care community in terms of the satisfaction and engagement of health care consumers. For example, whereas historically wait times were long for patients, health care organizations will risk consumer dissatisfaction for long wait times today.
http://nistbaldrige.blogs.govdelivery.com/2014/07/15/engaging-patients-in-a-changing-health-care-system/
