An Epidemic of Empathy in Healthcare by Thomas H Lee

Author:Thomas H Lee [Lee, Thomas H]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781259586316
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2016-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

Improving Measures, Data, and Reporting

Part of the leadership challenge driving an epidemic of empathy in the pursuit of better care is cultural. Ideally, clinicians and other personnel should accept the following:

• The organization has a noble goal that trumps all other concerns (e.g., the reduction of suffering).

• The goal is improvement, not being ranked the best. No one is the best. Everyone has aspects of care that can be improved, and everyone is starting from scratch with the very next patient.

• The orientation is toward care in the future, not what has happened in the past. Resting on one’s laurels is not an option in healthcare. Patients do not care what you did for those who came before them; they want relief of their present and future suffering. Data provide insight into opportunities for doing better.

• Measures and data will never be perfect. There will always be issues related to potentially perverse effects if measures are carried to an extreme (e.g., giving every patient narcotics). But the pursuit of that noble goal cannot be delayed until perfection in measurement and data collection is achieved. Not measuring would be a major strategic error. Fortunately, the organization uses common sense in the application of measures and data, mitigating those potentially perverse effects.

Acceptance of these cultural themes relies on good faith efforts by organizations to do all they can to make the measures and the data as good as they can be. Fortunately, tremendous progress in patient experience measurement and reporting is under way, enabling healthcare organizations to mitigate and even eliminate many of the most important concerns of clinicians. These advances allow clinicians to focus on the critical challenge—actually improving their care—rather than searching for weaknesses in the data that would provide a rationale for rejecting their implications. Examples are now available to show that modern era patient experience measurement can drive both patient-centered care and professional pride.

In sum, measurement of patient experience is imperfect and always will be. To use the resulting data to drive an epidemic of empathy, the right course is to make measurement better and more complete and use the data wisely. The key areas of improvement under way are the following:

1. Measuring what matters

2. Advances in data quantity and collection methods

3. Advances in data analysis

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.