Question

Quality Improvement is a continual process that recognizes changing patient needs and updates both clinical and administrative processes to meet those goals and provide the best possible care. How can social marketing assist with this notion of changing patient needs? How does coming to better understand the target customer enhance a healthcare organization's ability to meet patient's needs?

Answer 1

Ans) An improvement process often requires significant changes in people’s attitudes and behaviors, often requiring staff to give up their old standards and practices and adopt new ones. As a result, you can expect pushback from some staff as you introduce new processes and habits.

- Many staff will "get it" early and pitch in enthusiastically. But introducing and reinforcing changes in behavior that "stick" in the form of sustainable practices will take some work and time to succeed. Over time, as less enthusiastic staff see positive progress, they too will become more engaged and supportive.

- When you succeed, the payoff is significant, with benefits not only for patients but also for clinicians and staff. Many organizations have found that job satisfaction for their staff rises with improved patient experiences because the new, better practices usually reduce frustrating inefficiencies in the system that created extra work for staff.

- To decide which new ideas or benchmark practices to implement, the improvement team needs to consider several factors:

• Compatibility with the organization and local culture. Serving Cuban coffee in the waiting room of the clinics of a Miami medical group may be very patient-friendly, for example, but it is not likely to be viewed with the same enthusiasm by patients in Arizona or Massachusetts.
• Technical merit. The ideas that are most likely to be adopted are those that provide significant advantages over existing practices for both patients and providers—whether in the form of increased efficiency, higher patient and employee satisfaction, or improved outcomes. All improvement efforts ultimately have to answer the question: "What's in it for me?"
• Fit with the problem: The best intervention will be one that suits the specific problem you need to address (or can be tailored as needed). To ensure a good fit, the improvement team should seek input from both affected staff as well as patients or members. If you ignore either source of information in your planning, you may choose an intervention that will not fix the real problem.
Depending on the nature of the intervention, you may want to break it down into a set of related but discrete changes. For example, if the team decides to implement a new specialist referral process, you could begin by making changes to the procedures used to communicate with the specialist's office. The communication process with the health plan might then be the target of a separate change.