Health care is no longer the same after the global pandemic. One thing that this recent healthcare crisis has taught us is that our healthcare facilities were not prepared for the patient influx. This deficiency has led hospitals and healthcare facilities across the globe to transform and make preparations in advance.
Traditional health care is becoming obsolete. Despite the hard work of dedicated, well-trained clinicians, the world’s healthcare systems are facing rising costs and a deteriorating quality of care.
The health care industry has onboarded incremental solutions like fighting frauds, reducing medical errors, enforcing best practices, changing the way patients receive care, and introducing EMRs—but, none of these have made any substantial difference.
Therefore, it’s time to implement a radical change in strategy. Its primary objective is to maximize value for patients, i.e., to provide high-quality care at an affordable price. The healthcare system needs to move away physician-centric measures to addressing patient-centric needs.
Instead of focusing on maximizing profits and adding to medical services—consultations, admissions, tests, and procedures—the focus should turn to helping patients.
Consequently, rather than providing segmented care, health systems should strive to provide comprehensive but accessible medical solutions.
On this note, let’s take a look at some ways in which we can significantly improve healthcare systems.
Improve Healthcare by Adopting the Six Lean Principles
Lean methods are designed to reduce waste, improve quality, and reduce costs in healthcare organizations.
Health systems can identify best practice and protocols and incorporate them into their clinical workflows by applying this process improvement approach for routine care deliveries. This approach also allows for meticulous clinical data measurement and tracking.
The data from these best practices can be used to update existing protocols, which will improve performance across organizations. These principles will also result in waste reductions, lowered costs, and improved patient care.
Investments in basic healthcare
An emphasis on reducing basic healthcare costs can lead to better health access and outcomes. Health care leaders must call for a rise in the US healthcare spend, especially in primary care from 4–6% to about 15% to 25%.
Transform emergency care
Overcrowding in emergencies increases mortality rates, hospitalization times, and hospital costs. Healthcare facilities faced overcrowding issues during Covid-19.
To avoid facing such situations in the future, healthcare facilities need to transform emergency care. Overcrowded hospital emergency departments and patients who leave without receiving proper care indicate that overcrowdedness. Overcrowding in EDs can be addressed through data-driven approaches, which can be achieved through:
- Redesigning emergency care in four steps
- Analyzing the effectiveness of EDs
- Reviewing high-impact workflows
- Reviewing staffing patterns
- Leading by example
- Providing a better patient experience
Focus on prevention
Healthcare leaders must move away from the “sick-care” approach to prevention-based, comprehensive care.
Suppose a patient has an external ear infection. This infection can easily be treated with a topical antibiotic. Delaying getting treatment for the infection can lead it to become severe. Patients will delay receiving care due to the high deductible on their health plans.
Delayed care results in the patient getting hospitalized and receiving IV antibiotics for 4 days. They wound up spending thousands of dollars on something that would have only cost them just $120 to see a physician and get medication.
Streamlining patient flow with machine learning
In order to improve patient flow across the organization, health systems can rely on predictive models and machine learning.
As a result of improved hospital patient flow, patients wait times can be cut in half, staff overtimes reduced, and patients and clinicians’ satisfaction improved.
A health system can foster data-driven decision-making that improves hospital patient flow by focusing on three critical areas:
- Recruit a team of data scientists
- Aggregate all data sources using a machine learning pipeline
- Establish a comprehensive data governance team
Overcome outcomes with process measures
Healthcare organizations tend to place a higher value on health outcomes, but they won’t help them achieve their goal of improved quality and lowered costs if outcome measures alone are followed.
The healthcare systems should instead track process measures with more granular data. An analysis of a health system’s processes can reveal its root causes.
By using these checklists, the organization can ensure the provision of the right care to patients on a regular basis.
Avoid committing medical errors
Preventing harmful medical errors can result in an industry-wide saving of almost $21 billion, which can mean saving lives, of seven million patients, and resources.
Over half of adverse drug events (ADEs) are preventable, indicating that improving error prevention can be highly impactful. Monitoring, surveillance, and prevention of ADEs are becoming increasingly effective with current data and analytics workflows.
Final Words
Improving health processes should be the top priority for healthcare leaders, since efficient processes drive all health outcomes and activities in the healthcare system. However, by implementing the latest techniques and processes in their everyday operations, healthcare facilities can significantly improve patient and health outcomes.
