Healthcare IT - Improving Overall Patient Experience

Healthcare IT has been one of our favorite topics simply because of the potential opporunity it provides for EMR-EHR product vendors and service providers. The $41000 stimulus package Obama govt is pushing for is a great impetus for US Healthcare providers to implement the much needed "IT" in their organization.

Dr David Blumenthal, National coordinator for HHS, in his recent interview had talked about improving patient experience. This is something which we have been researching on for quite some time now. How can healthcare providers improve overall patient experience, enable transparency and be proactive, rather than being reactive.

Enhancing overall patient experience is a very important aspect of Healthcare IT and this is beyond any EMR/EHR. There are various ways by which you can improve the patient experience and take it to a much higher level and this starts well before the time the patient walks into a clinic.

Healthcare providers need to create multiple touch points for their patients to fix their appointments, enable them to view their medical records through patient portals and better integration with the ecosystem by automating the entire workflow. Web and mobile are two of the most important mediums for patient touch points.

There are lot of best practices followed by healthcare providers to improve overall patient experience some of which are:

• Enable scheduling via web/mobile mediums
• Easy and error free capture of patient info/demographics by integrating with digital pens or touch screens
• Reduce losses due to no show and provide alerts to physicians by integrating with mobile during patient encounter
• Ensure immediate availability of transcripts by integrating with voice recognition engines and transcription workflow engine
• Reduce errors and liabilities by integrating with ePrescription
• Improve patient service levels by integrating with patient portals
• Proactively educating patients on how to improve health and drug usage through SMS based alerts and flashes

By adopting these best practices, healthcare providers can engage with their patients very effectively and improve the overall patient experience.

Comments are welcome!