5 Ways to Improve Patient Care Quality
Are you having issues with decreasing patient volume and low patient retention rate? Or do your patients always complain about the long waiting time and not getting enough medical attention?
If your answer is yes to any of the questions above, it is time to improve your clinic’s patient care quality.
Quality patient care is defined as “care that is safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable”.
Despite the tremendous changes in the healthcare industry, one constant aim of healthcare providers is always to improve the patient care quality, in turn, to achieve an overall improvement of patient satisfaction and health outcome.
Here are five essential ways to improve patient care and emerge as the front-runner among your competitors:
Analyze current data to spot areas for improvement
Make your services more accessible
Train your team to communicate with your patients compassionately and effectively
Improve patient engagement
Improve productivity and efficiency
Analyse current data to spot areas for improvement
“You can't manage what you can't measure.”
- Peter Drucker
You must not ignore the value of data, the integral part of your healthcare practices. Always collect, track and analyse your data. Get the insights for improvement and work on them.
Data can come online or offline and in many different forms, including post-visit feedback, patient satisfaction survey, and real-time data of your daily operations like average queue time and consultation duration.
Take a close look at your patient’s average waiting time, are they waiting too long? If your patients constantly wait more than 30 minutes for their consultation, that’s just poor quality of care, especially if the patient is in discomfort.
Another important time-related data you want to pay close attention to is the average consultation time. If you want to improve your quality of care, you have to spend more time talking to your patients. Patient care isn’t about giving diagnoses and medicines anymore, you have to actually spend a portion of the consultation time to talk to your patients, understand their needs, and have a more personalised conversation.
Just as a patient care study has shown, the frustrating issue of long waiting time for patients can be effectively addressed by making necessary changes to improve your operation based on the continual review of patients’ feedback and real-time data on daily practices.
Not to mention the valuable insight you can draw by analysing the patient data, such as patient age groups, patient retention rate, and new/old patient ratio. In particular, it helps you draw the profiles of your current and potential patients, and thus tailor the branding and marketing strategies to expand your reach.
Data can also be used to predict the health conditions of your patient. You can take preventive actions for your patients when their data predict their conditions are getting worse. Based on the data, you can also create personalized healthcare plans to provide better care for the patient. That’s also why you need to have a fully integrated EMR system. It allows you to have complete views of individual patients’ past health data, including their chronic conditions, enabling more informed diagnosis and prognosis.
Make your services more accessible
While the healthcare industry has become increasingly competitive, every clinic is competing to make their services more accessible for their patients, whenever and wherever.
This is especially true during the time of a pandemic outbreak, when your patients may feel reluctant to come down physically, how do you make your services more accessible to them?
The answer is telemedicine, which provides healthcare services access for your patients in any locations with a stable internet connection.
It’s a promising new healthcare service delivery model in the age of technological innovation, a great way to improve cost efficiencies for both your patients and your clinic.
It can also act as complimentary service to provide follow-up or post-acute care services, greatly improving your patient care quality and sustaining your long-term relationship with patients.
Train your team to communicate with your patients compassionately and effectively
No doubt that your patients who are probably suffering from the pain and worrying about the condition want their concerns to be heard and addressed. Communication is thus one key part of high-quality patient care that you should be aware of.
You need to train your staff and practitioners to communicate with your patients not only effectively, but also compassionately
For your staff, communication with patients can happen anytime in the clinic, through emails and calls, or on social media platforms. Whoever is communicating with your patient represents the image of your clinic. They thus need to be trained properly to interact with your patients professionally and most importantly, deliver messages accurately.
Your staff plays a big role in providing better overall patient care, especially those who faces patients regularly. Make sure their attitude and manners are patient friendly. Additionally, they should be well educated on the services your clinic offers. For example, if your clinic offers vaccinations, your staff should be well educated on the side effects.
Improve patient engagement
A patient engagement survey has found that more engaged patients are more likely to meet their medical needs instead of delaying care and appointments. The general trend is that more engaged patients are healthier as they take higher levels of preventive care and self-management of their health.
In the long run, improving patient engagement is critical to quality patient care. You can have your healthier patients who come to appointments on time and stay with your practice as you help them maintain their good health.
The thing is that, you can’t improve patient engagement without spending more time with each patient.
We know it can be challenging as spending more time with individual patients could mean fewer patients each day and reduced production. A survey done with 555 healthcare professionals shows that 63% of them believe “time investment by healthcare team” is the greatest challenge in improving patient engagement.
You can always reduce queue time, speed up your processes including consultation and charting to save more time for individual patients and engage each patient on a personal level.
That’s why the most effective way to improve patient engagement is improving your clinic's productivity and efficiency.
Improve productivity and efficiency
When it comes to productivity and efficiency, a quality clinic management system is the key. It digitises and streamlines your daily practice, helping you to have more time to focus on your patients.
For example, filing physical documents is tedious and subject to human errors, which can be avoided through a trustable cloud-based management system. Your staff can thus extract information in much quicker and easier ways, saving more time to interact and cater to your patients.
Speed up your charting with UNO Electronic Medical Records (EMR). UNO EMR is AI and Clinical Intelligence driven to speed up your charting time and improve your diagnosis accuracy with ICD10 and SNOMED code. Saving you more time for your patient.
UNO EMR:
Auto-fill options, speed up charting process, more time for patients, less time on EMR
AI driven ICD10 and SNOMED code
Clinical intelligence
Fully integrated with CHAS, CDS, SFL, and many other schemes, seamless claims submission with pre-submission checks.
Looking to improve your quality of patient care?
Try UNO EMR
source:
https://health.gov/our-work/health-care-quality/about-health-care-quality#ref1
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1705904/
https://www.issuelab.org/resources/9734/9734.pdf
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-experience/3-biggest-challenges-in-designing-patient-engagement-into-care-delivery.html