Essay Sample on Improving Access and Quality of Patient Care: National Benchmarking Strategies

Introduction

In many healthcare organizations, policies to enhance people's health have always focused on increasing access to basic healthcare services while ignoring the quality of patient care. The effort that aims at increasing the need for significant interventions has often taken the assumption that the available healthcare is efficient, sufficient, and of high quality. The national benchmark for measuring patient's quality care includes structural measures that give the patient a sense of the doctor's process and capacity to provide quality healthcare (Tsai, Orav, & Jha, 2015). It focuses on the number of certified physicians and the ration of patients to that of the healthcare providers, as well as whether the hospital utilizes the medication order system or the electronic medical records. Process measures demonstrate the action taken by the healthcare provider to enhance patient care, thereby focusing on the percentage of the population getting preventive services. Outcome measures reflect on the consequences of care intervention on health status (Tsai et al., 2015). The paper seeks to explore ways of improving efficiencies and reducing errors in measuring quality while focusing on patient satisfaction, as well as exploring the solutions for measures that fall sort of the benchmark.

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Concerning measure to improve efficiency, reducing errors and enhancing satisfaction, several outcome measures have been implemented in the hospital, and they include the following: Mortality; it is among the significant outcome measures for quality care, for example, the standardization for patients with pneumonia has been implemented and caused a reduction of a significant percentage of mortality rate in pneumonia (Barr et al., 2015). The hospital also uses the safety of care outcome measures, which is focused on medical mistakes. The hospital uses safety and care in improving the quality of care through hospital-acquired infection and skin breakdown. The patients with skin breakdown have higher chances of being infected, and diabetic increases the risk. The hospital uses enterprise warehouse and applications for analysis to detect the most susceptible patients and monitor the compliance of the doctors with effective practice. Another outcome measure includes the readmission, after enhancing effort on lowering the rate of hospital readmission, the hospital reported a reduction of a significant percent rate which leads to greater cost avoidance. The hospital achieved this by implementing numerous care coordination programs.

Additionally, patient experience has also been implemented as outcome measures in improving efficiency and reducing errors. The hospitals conduct assessment on the experience of the patient, including the observations about the healthcare services they receive. Such information provides an outcome on the patient's satisfaction and triggers the improvement of the care service for a quick response for identifying the issues in healthcare (Barr et al., 2015). In some hospitals, it is used as a metric for effective work. Also, the effectiveness of healthcare is implemented to assess compliance of the healthcare providers with the guidelines and assess the achieved result in patients' care. For the hospitals, achieving the most suitable care outcome can be realized through making sure that the guidelines are adhered to; the hospital should tract the doctors' compliance; therefore, the treatment outcomes should be monitored.

More imperatively, the timeliness of patient care outcome measures is also implemented to assess the accessibility of the patient to health care. Notably, congestion in the emergency department is often linked to increased in-patient mortality rate, cost of patient admission, and increase time of stay. The measure focuses on specific areas including the pattern of staffing, assessment by the nurses, assessment to qualified healthcare providers, and the registration, thereby enhancing performance and efficiency, for example, lowering the rate of patients leaving the emergency without been treated (Barr et al., 2015). Finally, efficient use of medical imaging is a significant outcome measure since it plays a fundamental role in contributing to the enhanced patient outcome, as well as cost-effective patient care.

Regarding the solutions for the parameters that fall sort of the benchmark based on improved quality of care, patient satisfaction, and cost-effectiveness, data transparency can be used as a viable solution because patients usually depend on the outcome data to make an informed decision regarding health care. For instance, organizations that report quality often evaluate and report quality performance and hospital safety. Notably, public reports on care outcomes may help guarantee patients that they receive the most suitable and cost-effective care (Wolf, & Jason, 2014). Again data interoperability ensures the data is shared between departments, and the result is based on the capacity of the system to share data among doctors, hospitals, laboratories, and clinics. Therefore, improving the transition care by integrating the system and sharing data by interoperability is a fundamental solution. Finally, integrated care and transition healthcare is a viable solution as it helps to manage consistency care and provides cost-effective care and quality care.

Conclusion

In conclusion, health organizations have executed numerous measures in ensuring efficacy and sufficient patient care, which reduce errors and conform to the standards of patient satisfaction that includes outcome measures aiming at reducing mortality rate in certain diseases, including pneumonia. The hospital has also used safety care in which the compliance of the healthcare providers with the guidelines is the major focus. The hospital has also conducted an assessment of the patient's experience with the care provided to improve efficiency. Other measures include readmission, the effectiveness of care, timeliness of care, as well as efficient use of medical imaging. More importantly, the solutions, several issues should be considered, including data transparency, integrated care, and transition care, and data interoperability.

References

Barr, P. J., Scholl, I., Bravo, P., Faber, M. J., Elwyn, G., & McAllister, M. (2015). Assessment of patient empowerment-a systematic review of measures. PloS one, 10(5). Retrieved from:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4430483/

Tsai, T. C., Orav, E. J., & Jha, A. K. (2015). Patient satisfaction and quality of surgical care in US hospitals. Annals of Surgery, 261(1), 2. Retrieved from:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4248016/

Wolf PhD, C. P. X. P., & Jason, A. (2014). Defining patient experience. Patient Experience Journal, 1(1), 7-19. Retrieved from:

https://pxjournal.org/journal/vol1/iss1/3/