Usefulness: The bottom line for consumer data
August 1, 2000 3 minutes read
Usefulness: The bottom line for consumer data
Research suggests that when people seek care for themselves or their loved ones, they want a more personal recommendation than they’re likely to find through formal survey data, says Timothy P. Hofer, MD, MS, research investigator at the Ann Arbor (MI) Veterans Administration Center for Practice Management and Outcomes Research. He notes that consumers definitely resonate to different indicators than managed care organizations or physicians.
Sarah Loughran, senior vice president of content for Healthgrades.com in Lakewood, CO, notes that patients want a mix of quantitative and qualitative information. Outcomes such as complication rates or back-to-work times for procedures interest many. "However, it’s incumbent on any organization that dispenses statistical data to patients to explain how they are derived, their limitations and to constantly improve the quality of the data," she advises.
To many, Loughran continues, the social aspect of the patient-provider relationship is important, such as the physician’s gender or hobbies or the hospital’s religious orientation. Some appreciate a generous supply of educational material and view it as a sign of the provider’s willingness to regard them as partners in health care decisions.
Patrice Spath, RHIT, a health care quality specialist with Brown-Spath & Associates in Forest Grove, OR, says that what interests consumers most is the service and convenience they can expect from the health care facilities selected either by themselves or by their physicians. "Since more and more institutions have Web sites these days, quality managers should capture the soft data on services and patient satisfaction and post them along with the factual information," she suggests. "But do it in a friendly, marketing fashion, not as quality data."
Display phone numbers and service hours for the appointment center, and directions and parking instructions for the surgical unit, for example. Weave in soft data. "Our preoperative services consistently rank high with patients because we don’t keep them waiting; 90% are seen within 10 minutes of their scheduled appointments," Loughran says.
And when people actually become patients, Spath adds, minute-to-minute concerns predominate: "Does someone answer my call light and are they kind to me?" So if you have call light-to-answer cycle times available, it could be valuable to post them along with a testimonial quote or two from a satisfied patient.
Instead of loading the Web site with hard core quality data such as mortality and complication rates, Spath suggests listing a phone number within the organization where the interested few may call for such data. "The majority of people won’t use it," she explains, "but at least you will offer them the opportunity."
The cost of consumer information could be blissfully low for the organization that dedicates itself to improving the patients’ experience, Spath adds. That’s a simple way of saying that when a doctor tells a patient where and when the knee surgery will be, for instance, the patient’s concerns boil down to customer service: "How much sick leave do I need for the pre-operative things? Will the operation take place on time? Will they keep my family informed of my progress?
"Generally, money is better spent in providing good customer service than in telling people how good the service is. Good service influences the community’s attitudes, and physicians care when their patients complain about bad service," Spath points out.
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