Partnering with Patients to Drive Shared Decisions, Better Value, and Care Improvement: Workshop Proceedings by Roundtable on Value & Science-Driven Health Care

Author:Roundtable on Value & Science-Driven Health Care
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The National Academies Press
Published: 2014-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 2-14 Patient Experience Survey statewide results—adult primary care.

SOURCE: Reprinted with permission from Massachusetts Health Quality Partners.

Since 2005 MHQP has reported on clinical data using over 30 HEDIS measures at the medical group level for over 150 medical groups. Both reports can be found on our website, and with funding from Robert Wood Johnson as an Aligning Forces for Quality alliance, we are creating a consumer facing website that will make it easier for consumers to access and use MHQP’s performance data. It will look much more like what Judy Hibbard and Shoshanna Sofaer are recommending.

MHQP’s board recently approved a patient and public engagement strategy recognizing that we would not achieve our quality improvement goals without patient engagement. We realized that MHQP will never be a household name and in order to get consumers interested in using MHQP’s data we should partner with a consumer organization. Through a pilot also funded by Robert Wood Johnson we agreed to work together with Consumer Reports to jointly publish a special Massachusetts insert of MHQP’s statewide patient experience survey results. MHQP’s partnership with Consumer Reports was a milestone for MHQP in terms of our commitment to patient and public engagement. We teamed up together because both our organizations value sound data; MHQP has reliable information on physician performance and Consumer Reports has a 75-year history in sharing information with people in a way that helps them make decisions. Working with Consumer Reports, MHQP was able to share data with 120,000 Massachusetts Consumer Reports subscribers.

However, some of our physicians had a visceral reaction to being rated in Consumer Reports along with toasters and refrigerators. When I say physicians, it was not all physicians. Many of our physicians felt it was much better to have MHQP’s trusted data out there since there is so much garbage on the Web, but others just said, “You have no right to do this.” They felt that it diminished their professionalism. We have a problem here if putting data out to the public in a way that consumers can understand is an affront to physicians’ professional integrity. This is the problem MHQP is navigating.

While the display of the physician ratings was sensitive, the editorial that surrounded the ratings was not. The editorial focused on educating the public about improving their patient clinician relationship rather than finding a new doctor, and included actions for patients to take to improve their own care. The editorial included question from MHQP’s survey such as “How often did your doctor explain things in a way that was easy to understand?” As patients read these questions, they could think about their own experience as a patient and ask themselves, “How often did my doctor explain things?” And then the report noted that in Massachusetts, 84 percent of patients responded “Always.” Maybe your experience was different, maybe worse. The editorial also offered suggestions to get the most from your physician visit such as taking detailed notes, repeating your doctor's instructions back to them to make sure you understand the information, and if you are confused then say so.

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.