At its essence, health care is all about delivering the best possible outcomes for patients. Superior care is essential to success – no ifs, ands, or buts, about it. The challenge is that improving care can be expensive and many health care providers overlook the fact that failure to do so can lead to costly repercussions.
With increasing cost pressures in healthcare, hospitals are coming face-to-face with a growing need to revise their care plans and ultimately strengthen their treatment reputation. This post explores three effective strategies that can help providers improve patient outcomes.
Promote quality diagnoses
The road to positive patient outcomes begins with quality diagnoses. This is key to a patient’s care experience. With human errors making their way into diagnoses, contradictory data and information slowing down the process, and/or doctors jumping to conclusions too quickly, improper treatment can lead to unwanted costs and readmissions. To counter this, care providers need to implement modern software-based management systems to organize resources, reduce delays, errors, and boost quality.
Ensure effective and efficient treatment
Delivering an effective and efficient treatment plan should take priority. Implementing and delivering the correct approach for a given patient is critical to achieving successful outcomes. As with diagnoses, challenges can arise when creating a care plan for patients – for those with complex or rare disorders, insufficient research data can create a roadblock to an effective treatment plan. The solution? Advanced technology and management. For example, electronic health records, alongside fluid communication between specialists and physicians can go a long way when it comes to implementing care plans that stray from conventional patient treatments.
Continue care after discharge
As mentioned in our previous blog titled: “Avoidable Readmissions: Diagnosing the Problem” we cited that nearly $41 billion were reported from patient readmission costs (30 days after initial discharge), making readmissions one of the costliest problems in the health care industry. That said, many health care providers ought to revise the way they go about engaging and supporting patients after discharge. By incorporating advanced management technology into the transitional care process, providers can seamlessly work with care and case managers in providing patients with superior care even after discharge. This results in lower costs, fewer readmissions, and better patient outcomes.
Clearly, technology is a reoccurring theme when it comes to providing superior care in the health care setting. HealtheFirst capitalizes on this growing need in the industry and strings together all the necessary elements needed to deliver the best possible outcomes for patients. Bringing together patient profiles, secure patient information, communication tools, timelines, milestones, company forms, files, notes, medical history, business and provider financial performance and CRM all into the most user-friendly interface, HealtheFirst opens the avenue for businesses to optimize their care processes while reducing costs and keeping patients happy and healthy.