When you want to support patient wellness, having data to back up your claims and plans is helpful. The healthcare data must be collected appropriately and analyzed with proper techniques in order to give you useful information. Follow these four tips for using data to support patient wellness programs in your hospital.
Survey Patients about Their Satisfaction
Include patients and their opinions when considering patient wellness. Consider creating a survey that patients can complete about the care they receive at your facility. Be sure to use good survey design techniques so that it is easily understandable for everyone. If you have never created a patient satisfaction and wellness survey, consider working with an experienced biostatistician or an epidemiologist. That way, you can make sure that it will convey exactly what it needs to. One of these health professionals will be able to guide you on creating, implementing, and analyzing a survey that will provide useful data.
Implement Changes
After surveying has been done, go over it all to get a general consensus of patient’s opinions and experiences about the care they have received. It’s important to consolidate the information received to get a sense of what changes need to be implemented, and to get an understanding of what your facility is doing right so that personnel can continue to provide excellent care to all who come through your facility’s doors. This can be a great asset to all personnel, as they will feel confident in the care they provide and in their abilities to perform their duties.
Meet with Personnel
After consolidating this data from surveys, meet with your personnel and provide them the feedback that has been yielded. That way, they will have an idea of what they are doing right and what they might be able to improve upon. Providing in-depth details about how they should conduct themselves and how they should appropriately implement these changes will allow them to build their skillsets, and improve patient care at the same time.
Earn a Master’s of Health Administration
The classes and experience that you gain in this master’s degree program will prepare you to make improvements in patient wellness programs. Earning a master’s of health administration degree can be a great asset to you. This degree will provide you with the skills to boost the patient experience while also improving outcomes and keeping the costs of care as affordable as possible. Most health administrators will earn this degree or something similar. Whether you are looking to be a hospital administrator or run your own health clinic, this sort of degree would certainly be a step in the right direction.
Analyze Patient Data with Statistical Analysis Software
Collecting patient data is one task, but it is not helpful unless you analyze it. Proper data analysis techniques require the use of specialized software. Most of these software packages are proprietary and require a license or purchase of the software. If you do not have the software and lack the time to learn how to use the software and the best ways to analyze the data, work with a biostatistics expert. There should be plenty of tech-savvy med professionals around you to help with those sort of technical tasks. Ask those around you and you should be able to get pointed in the right direction.
Work with Public Health Experts to Develop Wellness Programs
Once your healthcare data from patients has been analyzed you could start to create or amend patient wellness programs. For example, if the patient data shows that patients lose more weight and keep it off if they are in a program that involves a buddy or a weekly check-in, implement those changes. If patients feel more satisfied when they see the same doctor at each checkup, try to make that change in how your hospital operates.
Set the Example
Remember, people follow and emulate what they have seen done by their managers and colleagues within their realm of influence. Administrators should be the first ones to try out new approaches and implement necessary changes. That way, the facility staff will feel more comfortable and confident the first time (and every time thereafter) they implement the associated changes. Making these things known to your staff if the first step in providing better quality of care, and creating a more amicable environment for patients and personnel. Take the time to do things right the first time, and patients will notice.
The healthcare data that you base programs on should be as sound as possible. Data collection methods, survey designs and analysis techniques are all important. Earning a master’s degree in healthcare administration and working with statisticians will help you to collect and analyze data and make the most of your time and effort.