As Payment Strategies Evolve, Patient Satisfaction Becomes More of a Priority at Many Hospitals

Eddie Hebert
2 min readDec 29, 2017

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The fee for service model that has driven American healthcare for so long is rightfully coming under attack. Steadily rising healthcare costs have convinced many that finding a better way of paying care is the only possible solution.

One cornerstone of many related strategies is to scale payments to providers based on how satisfied patients are with the care that they receive. With powerful organizations like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid and many major insurers now leaning on this newly installed lever, hospitals are understandably seeking ways to respond.

Improving Hospital to Patient Satisfaction can be challenging, but there are good ways to move forward for any organization that is committed to making progress. In particular, a novel new type of mobile application is proving to be an especially productive tool for many.

Forging a More Convenient and Reliable Connection Between Patients and Their Healthcare Providers

Patients frequently complain about feeling as if their concerns were being overlooked or ignored. In many cases, well intentioned doctors and nurses simply fail to recognize the ways by which patients most often try to put their needs into words.

In many more, patients simply do a relatively poor job themselves of clarifying how they are feeling and what types of support they could use. Oftentimes, the ultimate reason for this reticence or failure to communicate is a lack of suitably tuned means of getting in touch.

A new type of mobile application is making it much easier for patients to express themselves and for healthcare professionals to process these communications and respond. Nurse to Patient Satisfaction can easily rise significantly when even slightly improved communication becomes the norm. The same holds, and often to an even greater extent, when doctors have access to the same types of tools.

Convenience, Power, and Reliability Combine to Provide Everything Needed

The modern smartphone turns out to be an especially effective means of enabling such connections. Doctor to Patient Satisfaction that might suffer under normal circumstances can rise sharply as soon as patients are provided with a reliable means of getting in touch.

Even in the case of healthcare professionals to whom they more regularly have consistent access, patients can easily end up feeling empowered in ways that elevate their spirits. Nurse to Patient Satisfaction that might be fairly high under the usual arrangements can become notably improved when patients are allowed to communicate as they see fit. For the many hospitals that are now striving to improve these increasingly important metrics, that is always welcome news.

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