How could we, as patients, work together with healthcare practitioners to develop a widely-used measurement modality for holding our physicians and other health care practitioners accountable for their daily actions in practicing medicine?
From providing true, informed consent to responsibly prescribing antibiotics to educating patients about treatments options which are non-surgical, non-invasive and/or non-pharmaceutical options, could patients and providers work together to develop a method for measuring practitioner proficiency in major areas?
A widely-used and accepted “scale of accountability” could be a great tool for patients to hold doctors accountable to PATIENTS and positive patient OUTCOMES, rather than to insurers and administrators alone.
We know there are down pressures put upon healthcare practitioners by administrative superiors at the institutions which employ them. There are also governmental regulations, insurance compliance laws and, of course, the long-standing Hippocratic Oath, which provides some guidelines for the ethical practice of medicine. In my experience, the oath is largely ignored in practice and, dare I say, also outdated in theory.
What if a diverse group of physicians and front-line health care providers were to put together their own “exit interviews/performance reports/patient polls” citing measurements they believe would be fair and accurate standards by which PATIENTS could/should consistently hold providers accountable? Patients could then add to that discussion, fill in gaps, add measurement points.
In the business world, we often find the use of the 360 degree evaluation, or self-evaluation. Right now it seems as if the only meaningful accountability for physicians comes from health care administrators or law enforcement. Enforcement of law as accountability is not usually preventative in nature, but rather it’s punitive and usually AFTER the harm has occurred. With tort reform, medical malpractice claims are now very rare because such cases are not profitable for attorneys and deal with consequences only AFTER injury or harm anyway, which isn’t the best system for holding practitioners accountable while at the same time using those metrics to PREVENT willful or accidental harm, failure to meet the standard of care, issue of over-treatment, and under-treatment, etc.
All humans, including physicians, I would suppose, have the innate desire to understand how they “measure up” and what tools are being used to measure their performance as practitioners.
I would think many providers would want to better understand what accountability to a patient looks like, in action, and from the patient’s point of view. Physicians are graded, measured and very carefully observed in medical school and throughout their educations – as they should be – but should we not also measure them after graduation, in practice, by some formal standard that includes the patient perspective?
Crafted by Cornershop