What's your view on healthcare quality?

                Healthcare quality is often defined by which party is affected by the term.  A patient’s perception of quality is defined by different standards than the provider and the payer of the service.  Each party’s perception is their reality. The same health care encounter can be understood to have taken place in three different ways.

                A patient defines quality based on different factors such as the amount of time it takes to complete their service. Quality care is provided in a reasonable period. Outstanding waiting times take away from the entire patient experience and the “quality grade” for the encounter begins to drop. Many patients will base quality of care based on the amenities the health organization has to offer. Typically, patients will not understand, medically, the extent of their encounter and rely on other factors to determine the quality of their care. Hospitals who are able to offer hotel-like amenities are perceived to have high quality care to an extent.  Simple organizations may suffer from being labeled as not providing outstanding care.  Patients value awesome customer service and patient centered care. Patients want to feel as if they are the most important piece of the equation. Anything that will make them anything less, again, will lower their “quality grade”.

                A provider may view quality based on the actual care provided. The provider does understand the importance of customer service and providing patient-centered care, however, the most important aspect of care is the actual medical attention given. Providers want to know if their service was successful. Was what was intended to happen the result of the encounter? Was there an adverse reaction? Is the patient better or worse? These are some of the questions providers will begin to ask to determine the quality of care for that specific service or encounter.  Providers will also need to be conscious of regulation compliance. Healthcare is a highly regulated field for different accreditation bodies, legislations, and requirements for the government. Providers will constantly need to ensure that they are in compliance or their entire operations may be deemed as low quality or no quality.

                Lastly, the payers may have their view on what quality. The patient may look at their personal experience, and the provider may also look at a one to one basis, but the payer (insurance companies) can look at numbers. The payer are more statistical, for lack of better words. Is the health organization providing satisfactory numbers with their health encounters. Are they remaining within the specified parameters of the company in order to receive payments. The payers may be less concerned with patient-centered focus of health care and more concerned with the numbers and the money, hence they are categorized as the payers.

Quality is perceived differently depending on which view you decide to take on.