A new category of patient tools called Interactive Patient Care (IPC) helps hospitals meet service and quality compliance requirements.

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Although consumer-directed healthcare (CDH) is receiving widespread attention from the media, the focus is often on electronic medical record adoption or health savings accounts. These are important developments in improving care and lowering costs, but do little to address the critical aspects of patient education, satisfaction and empowerment. In this new era when the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)-enforced Hospital Consumer Assessment of Health Providers and Systems (HCAHP) performance measures may impact Medicare reimbursement rates for hospitals, what can hospitals do to ensure patient education and satisfaction? In other words, how can you ensure patient empowerment?

Empowerment is a broad buzzword today, but any patient in a hospital room understands its true meaning. My own patient experience with cancer taught me that. Lying in my hospital bed, recovering from surgery to remove a malignant stomach tumor. I was too uncomfortable to read, and spent countless hours staring aimlessly at an outdated TV. The days grew longer. I craved information about my condition, management of the upcoming chemotheraphy program, communication with friends and family and connectivity to the outside world. I felt a complete loss of empowerment.

Quality and Patient Satisfaction
There are public and private pressures to raise not only quality of care but also patient satisfaction. Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s 2006 Leadership survey revealed that meeting patient satisfaction and safety goals are leading priorities on the healthcare IT agenda.

CMS is recommending measurement of patient opinions through a new HCAHPS survey administered after patients leave the hospital. Voluntary today, the data collection and public reporting of patient satisfaction is expected to soon become mandatory. CMS has indicated that satisfaction measures will be added to quality measures to determine reimbursement rates in the future. In other words, a hospital will lose money through poor patient satisfaction, and conversely gain for high patient satisfaction.

There are additional drivers for patient-centric tools. The aging baby boomer generation, increased life expectancy and rising immigration trends put service pressure on the healthcare system. Hospital executive team compensation is often tied to patient satisfaction and quality scores. In today’s market, hospitals compete fiercely for physician, nurse and patient loyalty, making service differentiation very important.

New hospital construction will add 200,000-plus beds by the end of this decade, many in cardiology, oncology and women’s services. These service lines have demanding patients with heavy education and discharge requirements. The U.S. nursing shortage has hospitals aggressively searching for tools that streamline the administrative duties of nurses, which currently command more than 55 percent of their time.

Emerging technologies like electronic medical records or e-prescribing are no doubt helpful in improving care and reducing costs. However, they are not patient-facing tools, and do not actually help in patient education, pain assessment/management, real-time feedback and interaction that directly contribute to the patient experience that determines HCAHPS scores.

A new category of patient tools called Interactive Patient Care (IPC) helps hospitals meet service and quality compliance requirements. Patient engagement is a key leverage point for these initiatives. Using bedside monitors or televisions, IPC provides hospitals with tools to meet discharge education, medication teaching, patient safety and pain management requirements.

Simultaneously, IPC engages patients to provide real-time feedback to caregivers, and provides interactive capabilities and entertainment features at home or in a hotel – helping hospitals achieve higher HCAHPS scores. Through bi-directional interfaces with hospital IT systems, IPC automates time-consuming nursing tasks such as patient education, pain assessments and required documentation. Quality and service improvements lead to better outcomes.

Interactive Patient Care in Action
Consider, for example, Baptist Health, an 847-bed, five-facility healthcare system serving northeast Florida and southeast Georgia. Baptist was faced with dramatic increases in its patient population, many of  the baby boomer generation. Baptist wanted to find new ways to distinguish itself, improve patient education and satisfaction and ultimately empower patients to be part of their own care process.

Baptist implemented an Interactive Patient Care system directly at the patient’s bedside. It guides patients through their hospital stay, providing access to the people and resources they need to have an optimal care experience. The system brings a host of education, entertainment and communication technologies to the bedside via hospital room television monitors.

Baptist’s Senior Consultant for Service Excellence Catherine Graham reports that bringing an IPC system into the healthcare system was a unique opportunity. Graham’s vision was one in which patients can learn about their condition, collaborate with their caregivers, secure helpful services and enjoy entertainment resources – all from their hospital beds.

Nurses at the new Baptist Medical Center South were recruited with a focus on the benefits of IPC. Nurses like how it helps the patient address his or her own questions immediately. The IPC system will enable Baptist to automate several clinical and non-clinical processes, including patient education, pain assessment and service excellence practices. These are big benefits for the nursing staff in helping with regulatory compliance efforts.

The technology also automates the completion of patient surveys, the delivery of effective educational materials to patients and the patient’s ability to make comments or take notes in advance of a doctor’s visit. The video-on-demand aspects extend education and entertainment options and are very popular in the pediatrics and maternity wards.

Also at the Baptist Medical Center South facility, the documentation systems are totally electronic, which makes use of IPC a natural extension of the care process. The IPC system integrates with the hospital’s existing information systems, including Cerner for medical records and CBord for dietary information. IPC drives the value of these traditional “back office systems” forward to the patient.

What to Look For
The ideal IPC system should be under a single platform as opposed to disparate components, which makes for unnecessary integration and maintenance issues. The service must be easy to use and clinically relevant for patients; otherwise, usage rates will suffer and the value of the system drops. To maximize return for the hospital, the IPC system should be integrated into the delivery of care for nurses and physicians. The IPC should be treated as a critical link between existing health information systems and patients at the point of care.

To be truly interactive, the IPC software should automatically deliver pertinent information to patients at the bedside via monitors, automating and documenting quality and service requirements. This data in turn makes HCAPHS reporting comprehensive and efficient.

If the hospital relies on the patients to search and pull down the same information, response rates plummet. The IPC systems should include real-time results tracking to instantly determine core measures compliance, service excellence benchmarks, and outcomes predictors that in turn can impact financial performance.

For CDH to truly succeed, consumers must be personally impacted and personally empowered on the front lines of care – at the hospital bedside, from acute-care to ambulatory care to long-term care settings. IPC solutions are important tools, complementary to EMR and hospital IT systems, but are more directly patient-centric applications whose delivery at the point-of-care ensures the completion of service and quality requirements for hospitals. This improves not only patient care and outcomes, but drives new revenue opportunities and operational efficiencies for healthcare providers.