Social Media as an enhancer of patient experience

Today, I was going through one of the articles in Internet in recognizing the role of social media in hospitals and how it can enhance patient experience.  Different examples were cited from some of the prestigious Canadian healthcare organizations on how they have effectively utilized social media.

As an avid researcher in patient experience, I totally agree to the fact that social media needs to be incorporated into healthcare and its potential is still undervalued.  We need to think about how we can incorporate social media in enhancing patient experience.  Cited are few examples from my thought and your valuable input will be highly appreciated.

1.       Each individual hospital should form active groups (to include clinicians, patients, and their families) for their specialty services like Ob/Gyn, services dealing with long-term illnesses, genetic diseases, nutrition/dietetics, etc where they participate and discuss various aspects of care where clinician-patient interaction reaches the next level.  If we can incorporate community services to it, fantastic !

2.       Media like Twitter can be utilized for patient notification services.

3.       Social campaigns for preventive medicine can also be effectively carried out through social media. 

Social media like Facebook, Twitter, etc are used by some of the healthcare organizations in UAE as we see small logos under their website, but the question arises if they are using to its full potential? If not why?  One the reasons maybe it’s a new way of thinking.  Patients and clinicians needs to be educated to actively involve and thus changing the way of healthcare delivery.

 

 

 

Relationship between expenditure in service quality improvement initiatives and profitability in healthcare

What is the relationship between expenditure in service quality in healthcare and profitability? A daunting question that arose in my mind which prompted me to explore various research studies based on this question. Quite a lot of data was found from various sources ranging from Mathews and Ketal (1992) showing negative relationship between expenditure on service quality and profitability to studies by Subramanian et al showing very strong positive relationship. A common factor arose from these studies is that variables other than service quality improvement such as pricing, distribution, marketing and advertisement influence profits more than expenditure on service quality improvements like TQM. Interestingly there is striking evidence that expenditure on service quality benefits cannot be experienced short term and accumulate overtime making them less amenable to detection. The literature review also brought to my attention that mere spending in service quality does not actually lead to profits and the relationship between expenditure on service quality and profitability is neither straightforward nor simple. When we think of investing in improvement of service quality the right variable needs to identified and invested upon. It is however evident that the aforementioned service quality benefits accumulated overtime is what healthcare needs now to stay in the business and to increase the market share continuously. Hence expenditure in variables such as pricing distribution, competition, marketing, advertisement, etc should be considered as a short term investment to create a sudden change and expenditure in service quality should be considered as a long term investment, which will benefit the organization in a long run and keep them in business in this ever changing and challenging world of healthcare.

Yours

Binu. Gopinathan

A new world - how do the exisiting healthcare providers sustain

With lots of new initiatives and projects, the healthcare organizations are facing a stiffer challenge to maintain and to increase the market share. New theories are developed, new organizational forms formulated, and all aims to tackle a single challenge: to improve the quality of care and reducing cost. For the existing providers to sustain in the market, the only realistic hope is by substantially improving care delivery by launching a revolution from within. It time for them to seriously think about redesign their service or what we call to do a service reengineering. They must refurbish themselves by revamping the organizational structure, their core clinical processes, management systems, and cultures supporting them so that they excel at performing three discrete tasks simultaneously: rigorously applying scientifically established best practices for diagnosing and treating diseases that are well understood; employing a trial-and-error process to deal with complicated or poorly understood conditions; and capturing and applying knowledge generated by day-to-day care. It should be noted that no single dominant design exists as each organization has its own unique structure, culture, and environment. More important than the specific designs are the four principles on which they are based: focus on the decisions, tasks, and workflows crucial to optimizing patient care; separate high- and low-variability care; reconfigure the supporting infrastructure and practices to match redesigned clinical processes; and design structure and processes to help organizations learn from their daily work. This post will follow with a deeper discussion of SLM's in healthcare. Yours Binu. Gopinathan

Management in Healthcare: Why good practice really matters

Hi All,

Please see the attached interesting research study jointly performed by McKinsey & Company, London School of Economics, Harvard University and lots of hospitals around the world.

http://worldmanagementsurvey.org/wp-content/images/2010/10/Management_in_Healthcare_Report_2010.pdf

Yours

Binu. Gopinathan

Healthcare Management Some Useful Article

Dear All,

I have been reading an article written by Dr. Bashar on hospital management. Though not very modern, but will give an insight into the basics of hospital management.

Have a look, the link below will take you to the article.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/10054257/Hospital-Management-Dr-Bashaar

Yours

Binu. Gopinathan

Healthcare Facility Design

In this blog, I want to introduce to you a new way of thinking, evidence-based healthcare facility.

In an era where information is extremely important and every decision is made based on "evidence", it is time to think about evidence-based healthcare facility. It is a new ideology compared to evidence-based medicine, which is a highly talked about topic in this time.

The ideology is a complex mixture of patient-centered care, healing environment, and more importantly sustainability.

As a broader subject the whole idea of evidence-based healthcare facility should be subdivided into different topics and should be discussed indepth. My following blogs will be a sincere effort to do so.

Your way into healthcare management

Hello,

There have been a lot of queries recently to me from various parts of the world regarding the courses related to healthcare management and their prospects on fetching an executive job. The queries ranged from selecting the country to go for the post graduation to the potential employment opportunities after the course. So the following blogs will be dedicated to given a vague picture on the institutions offering the post graduate courses in healthcare management, the course content, the selection criteria, overall rating of the institution, and the job potential after the course from each of these institutions.

It is always better to decide your field of interest and work towards it from the very beginning. I am telling this because me myself having a graduate degree in physics and realising very late that healthcare and healthcare management is my field of interest, I found it extremely hard to find a post graduate course that gives me specialization in healthcare management. Though there was no shortage of educational institutions providing this course, many of them rejected my application simply because of my base degree is in Physics. Luckily my work experience after my graduation in the field of medical records helped me to fetch a seat in one the universities in UK.

Most of these educational institutions ask for a basic graduate qualification in a health-related subject. Otherwise one should have an experience of working in the healthcare sector for at least 2 years. It is always best to have a small academic break after your graduation and work in a hospital setting so that you have an experience in how the hospital works as it is a totally different entity from other organizations. These experiences will surely help in understanding the basics of management very quickly in the initial stages of your postgraduate course.

One should be very careful in selecting your institution for post graduate studies in healthcare management. It all depends upon your interest and your budget, although finance is not a problem as there are lots of scholarships available to fund for your studies. I will be giving you an overall picture on various institutions that offer a course in healthcare management in different countries and their relative benefits in the upcoming blogs.