Physician Profiling and Health Care Quality Outcomes

Introduction

The efficiency in healthcare takes time to be achieved and different measures have been put in place to ensure this. Physician profiling is one of the measures that have been put in place to analyze a physician’s practice patterns, use of services and outcomes of care. Healthcare is also a field that requires a lot of team work which is an important element to be analyzed when looking at the care outcomes. This paper will explore three strategies that can be adopted to improve physician quality practice ranking on physician profiling and quality report cards. CAHPS Hospital survey is one of the public reporting initiatives that targets patient feedback as well as collecting qualitative details on how care was provided at a particular facility.

Identify Where Failures Are

Gawande (2012) made a few recommendations on how to improve physician quality practice. Provision of health has today become broad that in the past few centuries and thousands of medication options and procedures that have been discovered. The initial foundations of medicine are based on the coming together of the different professionals (Horton et al., 2017). Healthcare is not a system; rather, it is important to identify successes and failures in the provision of care. For example, the failure could be on poor quality which could be as a result of the physician failing to consider the most effective management plan. As Gawande (2012) puts it during his speech at Ted Talk, it is important to gather information and data, interact with it, and identify existing gaps

Checklist

After the failures are identified, the next recommendation is to come up with solutions. A checklist is a tool recommended to help physicians track the quality of care they are providing. The checklists help physicians get better at their work. For example, a checklist for surgery can be created to help ensure quality of services and that high standards of care are maintained by the team involved. Checklists are tools that are meant to make the experts better. The idea is, the experts can not automatically handle and control everything. Checklists help experts handle complexities, detect signs of impending danger and intervene swiftly and on time (Shahian et al., 2016). For example, the quality of care can be improved if the team goes through a checklist before a surgery begins; also, the team is prepared for any complexities before the start of a procedure. Gawande (2012) explains that use of checklists has helped improve quality of care across the world.

Implementation of Action Points

When strategies or action points are designed, it is necessary for physicians to fully implement them. It is necessary to involve the professionals across the field to implement all the identified action points (Hall et al., 2015). Values like values, humility, and discipline are embraced by each professional. Implementation has to do with letting go of values like self-sufficiency and adopting team work. Quality care can be achieved through teamwork especially because of the advancements and different specializations. At the end of the day, the physicians have to work together as a team in order to achieve team success (Gawande, 2012). This ensures that even with the numerous changes in the field, systems are working, existing failures are identified and working solutions are implemented.