Make Changes in Your Practice to Benefit Your Patients

A problem that many healthcare provides have is that they don't treat their office, clinic or hospital as a true business. However, just like any profit-based business, it's important that a medical provider ensure that their repeat business is due to a job well done rather than because patients are getting sicker or not responding to treatments. This isn't about incompetent doctors and nurses. Instead, this is about how little attention is paid to certain aspects of patient care, such as clinical interventions. One of the ways to ensure that this occurs is to track data and see what's working, what's not, and then implement new plans and track the results of those as well.

How do you measure clinical interventions? That's a common question, and it's not an easy task. Not only does it require you to have the right system in place to track your methodologies, it also requires you to have a great deal of patience as you discover whether or not an intervention will work at all. The truth is that healthcare quality improvement requires a certain amount of dedication on the part of caregivers, and not everyone is willing to put the time and effort into the process that's necessary to see results.



If you are willing to do this, then you also need to be open to trying new things. As an example, obesity and high blood pressure are running rampant throughout the United States. However, for most doctors, the first step is medication rather than allowing the patient time to lose weight and change their lifestyle. Why is is this the case? Simply put, most doctors don't believe that their patients will follow through on the lifestyle change. This is due to their own anecdotal experiences that has proven them right again and again.

The question is, who is at fault here, the patient or the doctor? The truth is that this may be a combination of both. Without a system in place to follow up with patients to ensure that they are making the necessary life changes, patients feel alone and overwhelmed. Doctors then get frustrated because their patients don't make the progress that they should.

What if, as a doctor, you tried different methods for engaging your patients in a major change? In order to determine what is working and what isn't, you would have to log the data and measure it against medical standards, as well as the methods used with other patients in a similar situation. This way, you could measure clinical interventions and see what's working and what isn't and potentially have a major impact on the lives of all of your patients in a similar situation.

The truth is that much of the health industry needs work. However, it's up to the people working in those fields to identify the problems and then take steps to make changes. This can be done with the right software as well as the right attitude throughout the process.