Doctors in America are increasingly finding their pay tied to measurements of patient outcomes. Insurance companies are shifting away from what have traditionally been fee-for-service payment models. The new standard is how successfully patients are returned to good health rather than just what treatment they received. Insurers also consider how patients report their level of satisfaction with a healthcare provider experience.
These changes are part of an overall movement across the healthcare industry to focus on outcome measurements in all aspects of the delivery of medical services.
Achieving the Best Results for the Most Patients
In theory, the concept is simple to understand. In any other industry, it might be called quality control. It’s about doing as good a job as possible, while making as few mistakes as possible, and ending up with a positive result for the highest possible percentage of patient interactions completed.
The challenge for health care is making statistically accurate outcome measures consistently over time while serving millions of patients a day. Tracking all that information requires “big data”-handling capability that must be more powerful now than ever before. That’s because the healthcare industry has one of the most complex of all business models.
This, in turn, has raised the issue of developing software-driven outcome measurement tools that can swiftly and efficiently collect data. That information must then be presented or made available to users in a way that is easy to understand, is not cumbersome and doesn’t make the situation worse.
The Role of Transparency
Industry insiders have a key term for this. It’s called transparency. The lack of transparency in outcome measurement data has been identified as a critical component of rising healthcare costs. When the outcomes of a medical facility cannot be accurately tracked and monitored for quality, it’s a significant problem. Advanced, high-tech outcome measurement tools are the solution.
