“The benefit of this is patient satisfaction is really related to what people expect. If there is a gap between expectations and what’s observed, that’s where a lot of dissatisfaction comes into play. The theory is you can raise satisfaction just by realistically letting people know what it will happen, so it’s not a surprise,” Dr. Ferrans says.
Ferrans notes that not only are there the obvious reasons for raising patient satisfaction, but thanks to the Affordable Care Act’s Value-Based Purchasing program, a hospital’s Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) score will also lead to possible reimbursement from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS).
If your hospital or health system believes that a more informed patient is a more educated patient, Ferrans recommended you get friendly with the marketing people at your organization. He says their knowledge of the consumer patient base needs to be harnessed to improve care and change their behavior. This leads to effective patient engagement, he says, which has significant prominence in the changing healthcare environment.
“As we go from fee-for-service to fee-for-value, organizations need to learn how to digitally engage their patients, they need to learn how to case manage their medically complex five percent, and they need to learn how to use analytics to drive performance. Those are the challenges, it’s creating a lot of new IT and a lot of new learning, population management is the next evolution in healthcare,” Ferrans concludes.
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