Patient-centered Care Starts With Physicians
Hospital patient-centered care begins with how the physician communicates with the patient in his or her office.
This article took me several re-reads in order to understand that it was written from a hospital marketer’s perspective. The writer indicates that a patient’s first impressions with healthcare are more than likely to come from patient-physician interaction, as opposed to being in the hospital. And the physician/physician-group is the patient’s interface with hospital care.
So how are physician’s perceived? In most cases (2/3 of the time) it is a paternalistic or physician-directed style; they ask the questions and guide the conversation, and you (briefly) answer and don’t interrupt.
Satisfaction surveys don’t show the real truth of a patient-centered practice, because patients are not accustomed to any different type of doctor approach to their care, and dissatisfied patients don’t tend to fill them out. So there is not problem that shows up on statistics, but the surveys are too brief to reveal a problem.
Interestingly, and with a financial impact on doctors and hospitals, in “2012, the quality of the physician-patient experience will make up about 30 percent of Medicare hospital reimbursement. Individual physician reimbursement will be affected as well.”
An additional post about Medicare reimbursement is coming up.
