Thanks to government regulations, lobbying by patient advocacy groups and fierce competition within the industry, healthcare providers across the United States are becoming increasingly sensitive to issues such as patient safety and patient satisfaction.
Many hospitals and oversight organizations have created scorecards that are regularly updated to keep track of improvements and declines in these areas. A group of researchers at Hopkins set out to develop a framework to ensure that the scorecards themselves contribute to maintaining a high level of patient care.
Today's healthcare organizations, particularly hospitals, view customer service as an important part of their mission of caring for patients, as well as a means to attract top doctors, charitable donations and press attention for their institutions.
To offer consistently positive experiences for patients requires constant monitoring of performance in a wide variety of areas of the hospital, from the quality of medical and nursing care to hospitality services and building maintenance.
Scorecards are intended to provide a comprehensive assessment of an institution's strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately many commonly used scorecards fall short because they do not provide a rigorous scientific review and the results are sometimes not directly applicable to patient care.
To help rectify this situation, the Hopkins researchers said any scorecard should be evaluated on three simple questions: Are the results it provides important? Are the results valid (that is, accurate and reproducible)? Can the results be used to improve care for patients?
In order to provide important and useful results, the analysts found that a scorecard needs to reflect the hospital's goals. Different scorecards place emphasis on different areas of patient care, and healthcare organizations select a scorecard that matches the areas of importance to them.
With respect to validity, the most important recommendation from the researchers was to select a scorecard designed to use sound evidence to support its findings. For instance, context is important: One should not assume that a problem in one part of the hospital is true on a different ward.
One of the important goals of most scorecards is to measure patient safety. The researchers emphasize that scorecards should give understandable results that can be readily applied to improve safety practices in hospitals.
The potential uses of a reliable scorecard in improving health care centers is huge. There is a great need to track progress in patient safety and other areas of patient care. Changing something as simple as a scorecard can allow a hospital to dramatically improve the way it cares for patients.
