Making Patient Centered Care a Reality

A paradigm shift to bring patient care back into focus

The purpose of healthcare, obviously, is to care for patients. But ask anyone who’s visited the doctor or a hospital recently if they felt like they were at the center of their care, and their answer is unlikely to be a resounding yes. 

What will it take to bring the focus of healthcare back to the patient?

1. The Patient Centered Care Paradigm Shift
2. Are healthcare quality standards improving patient care?
3. What Efficiencies can Hospitals Use to Return to Patient Focused Care?
4. The Shift Back to Patient Centered Care is Underway

The Patient Centered Care Paradigm Shift

It’s ironic: so much of the paperwork, administrative burden, and red tape associated with healthcare services today was originally put in place for one purpose: to serve the patient. 

• Records were created to keep track of conditions and treatments, to manage medication and detail a history of care. 
• Accreditation and quality certifications became the norm because these were a way to ensure minimum safety standards.
• Specialized departments and practices were created to offer targeted and highly specific care for various disease states, from the widespread to the uncommon.

But documentation, maintenance of accreditation and certifications, and communication between departments have all become bottlenecks to providing excellent and high-quality patient care. As healthcare evolved to what it is today, well-meaning standards were erected to protect patients. But in many cases those healthcare standards and rules have become burdens that require extensive amounts of time and attention from physicians and staff, ultimately taking that time and attention away from their focus: patient care. 

This complexity is highlighted in an excellent summary published in January and currently viewable on the National Library of Medicine website, where it says, “Despite the potential improvement intended from both traditional and modern QA projects, several limitations and drawbacks exist. "Quality" by nature, is difficult to quantify. Assurance of quality often can be more related to assuring the standard of care was met than by assuring a specific metric. By assuming a binary set of outcomes (i.e., yes or no), these metrics become inflexible and do not take into account complexities related to patients' needs and goals of care."

Do Healthcare Quality Standards Improve Patient Care? 

Historically, the accreditation of hospitals and the institution of departmental standards were put in place to ensure patient safety and a minimum for quality of patient care. The growing challenge is that quantifying quality is not a simple matter, and maintaining accreditation can be costly and time-consuming, while not directly tied to higher quality care for patients.  

“I’ve even spoken to a client recently who made the surprising decision to drop their American College of Radiology (ACR) accreditation status,” said Charlis Penson, Global Director of Sales and Marketing for Enzee. “When I asked why, he told me that they’d analyzed the time it took to do all the work to meet the requirements for accreditation and how many new patients they received as a result of having it, and the math didn’t add up for them. 

“I think it’s important to note that although this specific institution is no longer broadly ACR accredited, they’re still required to do daily QC testing to ensure high quality and optimum device operation through regulatory requirements and practice standards. But they decided that the extra paperwork and time to maintain ACR accreditation wasn’t necessarily justified, and in some cases, focusing on that actually might be detracting from the tasks that ensured real day-to-day quality in their department.” 

Additionally, this radiology director told Penson that patients didn’t seek out specific hospitals or departments because they were or were not accredited by a certain organization. He suggests that as long as the care is the best it can be, patients are satisfied. And by shifting his focus away from paperwork and accreditation, his department actually gets more time to focus on patients. 

“I don’t think accreditation should be looked at as a bad thing. But given the current staffing shortages in healthcare, I think this example signals the potential start of a paradigm shift,” Penson said. “Providers and institutions are being forced to look for greater efficiencies wherever they can in order to maintain high quality patient care. While dropping accreditation might not be common, we’ll see more places begin employing automation tools like ZapIT! QA to help them ensure quality, while also focusing on patient centered care.”

What Efficiencies Can Hospitals Utilize to Return to Patient Focused Care?

Documentation, quality assurance, and diversification of healthcare through specialties are all critical to patient focused care. The key is going to be implementing efficiencies within these critical areas to ease the administrative burden on doctors and staff. 

1. Documentation: 

There have already been amazing innovations in digitization of medical records, the introduction of virtual care, and the inclusion of patient communications into the transfer of information from one provider to another so that patients better understand their care and can advocate for themselves. Digitizing medical records has created efficiencies in scheduling, medication management, disease management, and communication between patients and providers. 

Other areas of healthcare are on the brink of digitization as well. Radiology departments have digitized images and can now share with patients and other providers in a fraction of the time it once took. Some departments are also finding ways to utilize innovative solutions to digitize the daily tasking associated with record keeping. QC checks of various devices and medications, typically recorded on a clipboard or in a spreadsheet, can now be entered into ZapIT QA, which flags inconsistencies and allows easy spotting of trends in data. 

2. Quality Control

Every area of healthcare has specific safety and quality baselines to maintain, which is the purpose of accreditation and certification. Aligning the certifying bodies with the move toward electronic documentation would allow institutions and inspectors to share efficiencies in this process. Instead of laborious, paper-focused tours that involve visiting every department and facility in person to scan paper records, inspectors can view a dashboard that brings data from each area of the institution together in one place. Trends and red flags are more easily spotted and handled, and the numerous staff involved in the inspection process are returned to their focus: patient care. 

3. Departmental Communication

In the past, departments often operated in silos, with critical data and records literally transferred with the patient from place to place in a clipboard or binder attached to their bed. Most institutions by now have adopted electronic records for tracking patient visits inside a hospital, but there are still areas where communication between providers and departments could be streamlined by using one single software application instead of various apps for different departments. This is a major issue, and one that several companies like Enzee are approaching to build pathways (or application programming interfaces - APIs) that will allow specialized software to share critical information. 

The Shift Back to Patient Centered Care is Underway

Though paperwork and red tape still dominate many arenas of healthcare today, the paradigm shift is underway. In an age when so many institutions are understaffed, all of them are looking for ways to streamline processes and improve efficiency in order to bring the focus of healthcare back where it belongs: on the patient.