How Hospitals Are Improving The Patient Experience.
September 12, 2018 by Staff
Filed under Health, Tech/Internet, Weekly Columns
(Akiit.com) Back in the olden days, it was enough for a person to take a trip to their doctor, get their diagnosis and recommended course of treatment, and be on their way. Today, that’s changed somewhat. Hospitals now look for ways to ever improve their services in all sectors, especially the patient experience. It’s a relatively modern idea, but a welcome one, if only because most patients are in an anxious state when they first arrive in a hospital; if they’re more at ease, treatment and examination becomes much easier. And then there is the intrinsic value of improving the patient experience: you want people using your services to be happy. Here’s how they’re doing it.
Improving the Environment
OK, it’s hard to deny that hospitals haven’t always been the most
welcoming of places. Indeed, they never will be: people do not choose to spend time in a hospital, do they? Still, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to make the setting more bearable for the people who are likely on edge because they’re in a hospital in the first place. Many health care centers are now taking steps to improve the lighting, smells, and overall comfort levels of their establishment, and doing away with some of the aspects that were overly and unnecessarily clinical. They’re also putting more control in the hands of the patients, by allowing them to change the temperature in their room, the food they eat, and so on.
Better Aftercare
Hospitals once had a mindset of “out of sight, out of mind” when it came to their patients. They had done their job, now it was time for the patient to move on to the next stage of their recovery, with whoever that may be. Now, more and more hospitals are trying to improve their aftercare service, by offering services that make a trip to the hospital more “all inclusive.” In office prescription dispensing, for instance, is becoming increasingly popular. It allows hospitals to boost their profits, and saves their patients a sometimes long trip to the pharmacy.
Increased Nurse Engagement
One of the reasons why robots and AI will never replace nurses and doctors (at least not soon) is because they lack one of the most comforting aspects of health care: the “human factor.” There have been great leaps forward in making nurses and doctors, though nurses in particular, more engaged with their patients. They don’t have the time to spend twenty minutes getting to know their patients, but can spend a minute or two with them. Many are now trained on how to get the most out of those brief encounters in order to make the patient more relaxed.
Upgraded Technology
Hospitals were quick to embrace technology, but they weren’t always so quick to update and upgrade that technology. But they are now. Hospitals are coming to realize that the digital age is no fad; it’s a revolution. The paper trail that hospitals used to rely on are slowly giving way to their digital counterparts, making everything more fluid and the data more reliable.
Staff Writer; Carl Barker