Yannis
Valtis, MD
Resident in
Internal Medicine and Pediatrics
Brigham and
Women’s Hospital
PGY 2
02/12/2020
Yannis Valtis, MD |
Over the
past weekend, I attended the National Health Policy Conference organized by
Academy Health in Washington D.C. Two main themes kept coming up in keynotes,
plenaries, and side conversations among attendees: 1) the importance of data
liberation and, 2) the need to focus on the patient experience of healthcare
delivery.
Data
liberation can refer to facilitating patient access to their own medical
records, provider access to records from other systems, or public transparency
around quality and price for different healthcare services and providers.
Patient advocates, health systems leaders, policy makers, researchers, and
government officials champion it broadly. While it is clear to me how a young
millennial patient who grew up in the age of the Internet would make use of
such data availability, the picture is less clear when it comes to elderly
medically complex patients.
The second
theme that permeated discussions was that most patients rate most of their
interactions with the healthcare system poorly. One CEO commented during a
plenary – “most health care systems have net promoter scores of zero.” (The net
promoter score is calculated from the proportion of people who are very likely
to recommend a service to a friend.) This idea was alarming to me – if people
already find interacting with the healthcare system mostly frustrating, will
data liberation help or exacerbate this? I think the answer depends on how we
as healthcare providers respond to increasing data transparency.
When I think
of my complex elderly patients in primary care clinic, I doubt that access to
raw medical record data or long spreadsheets with price lists across different
health systems will make their experience of getting care much better. PCPs,
however, have a unique role in shaping this experience and can use increased
data transparency to empower their patients to make better choices. A PCP will,
for example, be able to take price into account when recommending a specific
imaging procedure or specialist consultation. As with most policy interventions
in healthcare, the buy-in and commitment of frontline clinicians will be
critical to the success of data liberation.
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