Cost is always an important issue in healthcare, and a new report from Press Ganey shows hospitals with better patient experience scores also reaped financial benefits.

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Press Ganey’s annual “Strategic Insights” report examined patient experience scores, care quality data and other measures and found a direct link between patient experience and safety. Health systems in the highest quartile for patient engagement scores on the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) also had higher net margins, lower spending in the first 30 days of care and higher payouts per beneficiary.
 
This study demonstrates that "when you focus on the right things for patients, you’re not only improving the delivery of care and meeting needs, you’re actually doing it in a more cost economical way,” said James Merlino, MD, president and chief medical officer of Press Ganey’s strategic consulting division.

The findings in the report offer important insights for providers regarding key drivers of care and their influence on financial performance. Chief financial officers, for instance, may be focused on the bottom line by the nature of their jobs, but the findings emphasise that if they put effort into supporting patient engagement or clinical quality programmes it benefits their area of focus as well.

According to the report, providing compassionate, quality care for patients — the very reason many people go into medicine in the first place — is one of the most important drivers of the switch to value-based care.

Nurturing a culture of safety within the organisation is also vital in achieving value-based, patient-centred care and competitive success. To effectively do this, Dr. Merlino said, it’s important that safety is made a priority and that safety data and records of adverse events are made transparent internally.

“One of the things you find when you go to healthcare organisations is many times managers don’t know what the data is,” he pointed out. But when they have access to data, it can be used as “a tool to help their people understand what’s going on in the environment.”

Source: Fierce Healthcare
Image Credit: Pixabay

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patient engagement, patient experience, Profit Improvement, patient safety. Press Ganey’s annual “Strategic Insights” report examined patient experience scores, care quality data and other measures and found a direct link between patient experience and safety.