Voice of the Patientᵀᴹ for Patient Centered Primary Healthcare
The use of patient reported measures to determine the quality of healthcare services and improvement thereof, is becoming increasingly important to enable patient centered care. Some strides have been made in the use of these measures in tertiary settings, but their application in primary care is lacking behind. Typical primary care practitioner profiling in the South African context is largely focused on cost efficiencies and proxy measures for quality care. Although these are important, by not incorporating the patient perspective an opportunity to drive patient centered care is lost
As part of Insight’s commitment to drive high quality, patient centered healthcare; Insight collects patient reported measures through our Voice of the Patient digital platform. This feedback from patients on how they perceive their primary healthcare journey is incorporated into our primary care profiling and reporting framework. This allows for a 360 view which considers outcomes that are important to ALL stakeholders within the healthcare ecosystem: funders, clinicians and patients – cost efficiency, clinical outcomes and patient reported measures.
Our findings underscore how these three metrics are interdependent: patients who reported superior experiences in their interaction with primary care providers also had greater clinical outcomes and lower cost both at an aggregated level and for specific conditions. Apart from generating a patient-centered view, the data gathered through the collection of patient reported measures provides valuable information to guide interventions for quality improvement that is not only informed by clinical data and cost, but also the voices of those healthcare is ultimately meant to serve.
At an implementation level, it should be noted that although clinicians understand the importance of the inclusion of patient reported measures in profiling, the process of adoption is a journey. A stepwise approach which includes the following allows for adoption that is founded on collaboration and a shared goal for improving patient outcomes:
- Communication to create awareness and build trust,
- Transparent sharing of results with no financial consequences and finally;
- Linking results, along with cost efficiency and clinical outcomes to value-based contracting initiatives
