Illness is a crisis, wellness is personal and care delivery is complex. The healthcare networks of today are struggling to describe the meaningful impact they are making to care. With confused regulatory compliance requirements, poorly or misaligned incentive plans and the lack of transparency to the consumer regards their care options, we continue to build inertia into measuring the quality of care.
Even as we try to bring discipline to quality outcome measures, we continue to use or are stuck with technology that is designed to bill for services and not at all designed to deliver better care, let alone make it safe. With work processes focused on reimbursement and regulatory requirements, we can't really measure the quality we are striving for.
We further exacerbate the situation by antagonizing our clinicians, pushing the onus of longer term care outcomes to them and base their performance on mundane task completion at a lower cost point, whilst increasing their throughput. Physicians have traditionally been trained to respond effectively to the acute care event and our re-imbursement and interventional technologies including drugs, biotech and devices are expertly used to allay immediate and long-term consequences of the patient's ailment at the time of presentation. There are many vectors beyond technology that interfere with the goals of rational quality care delivery and continuity of care, including the punitive tort laws, archaic Stark laws and now meaningful use incentive payments. Utterly confused, the health system looks to the tools it has to measure quality, but we have not critically analyzed the ability and relevance of the tools we are implementing.
The new age of information intelligence gives us the opportunity to optimize outcome and rationalize costs, with a more tailored and also responsive care approach. We need to enable universal local and specialty outcome measures such as reduced morbidity, longevity and reduced frequency of check-ins but with the intelligence of associating critical demographic and care team interventional data. If we could enable a market to be transparent and base their service on outcomes we would spurn the much needed pivot in healthcare delivery that we need. We need to get out of the clinical team's way and map the data of the care interaction, then use the data to empower and align teams to local problem solving focused on shared goals of improved outcomes. We need to move away from scoring the doctor to scoring the patient, their engagement and their care team.
We must digest data, map data, visualize data and create intelligent hyper-local data environments that allow care institutions of any size to optimize to a better outcome. Managing to regulatory outcome is the antithesis of patient outcome as the regulations were designed without clear clinical outcome corollaries. Scoring patients and teams and associating the right data to the outcome achieved, will do wonders in aligning efficiency, quality and timeliness of care delivery.
Mapping the care coordination and timeliness of intervention and then the satisfaction of care delivery creates a closed loop for managers to optimize their teams that self reports and self motivates. Quality metrics of response time, patient satisfaction based on complexity of care and tiered responses based on acuity of clinical issue can help an ACO allocate its resources, a specialty team identify an unsuspected high risk patient and for a patient to have improved timely access to the care team to avert the default visit to the ER. We are in an age where technology in the right hands with the right interfaces creates a data matrix that builds on the notion of quality. At the end of the day we are measuring quality and to measure it appropriately we need to enable it to evolve and solve for each team member's contribution to the outcome.