My aging joints have led me to a Sports Medicine clinic, part of the Univ of Colorado Hospital system. Apparently they are gathering evidence about quality of service and patient satisfaction -- not long after an appointment, I receive a (mercifully brief) email survey asking: Were you seen on time? Was the staff helpful and friendly? and Did we answer your questions about your health issues? (Then there's a place to write comments.) OK, so these seem like pretty good benchmarks to track.
Transparency = Better evidence. I was impressed that after submitting my responses, they provided a link to the overall survey results for the entire hospital system: See it for yourself here.
But what about ...? Don't get me wrong: I'm not knocking this survey effort, since most of the U.S. health care system seems to have overlooked the fact that they might do better if they have happy customers. But health care is so tricky, and measuring a few happiness-related outcomes doesn't mean that I'm getting the best medical care. I've blogged before about the difficulty of comparing health care facilities. After writing about CalHospitalCompare.org, I received queries from them, interested in hearing my thoughts on how they could offer more useful information. It's a tremendous challenge to present evidence that will be helpful to the average patient. Here are some things the Sports Medicine clinic might do to gather evidence from patients, that could help them bring in more revenues if they applied it skillfully:
Follow-up: UCH could gather longitudinal data to check whether I have continued as their patient, and find out if I'm satisfied with the progress of my treatment.
Coaching: And they could use technology to prompt me to continue my treatment, complete my prescribed physical therapy, etc. This is an area I'm working in now, called persuasive technology. It offers an outstanding opportunity to provide evidence to people at the time when it really matters, so it will influence their outcomes as positively as possible (a health care example is a smoking cessation program). For more details, look up the program or proceedings from the recent Persuasive 2008.
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