Time to Put Patients First

http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/print/MAG-250882/Time-to-Put-Patients-First

“How America's hospitals have lost touch with their top priority—and what healthcare leaders are doing to fix it.

At the core, healthcare has just one mission: caring for patients. And yet it still fails them along the entire spectrum of care. Americans can't understand why they must wait months for an appointment with a specialist. They continually hear horror stories about wrong-site surgeries and hospital-acquired infections. They have trouble getting their physicians, specialists, and alternative providers to talk to each other—let alone communicate effectively with them. And then they get a bill for it all that they can't understand.

While no universal fix has been found to address these and other challenges, some healthcare industry innovators are leading change.

They're putting in place programs and strategies to truly put the patient at the center of everything they do. They are making renewed efforts to move patient care to the bedside, coordinating healthcare among disparate providers, and changing how they hire and deploy staff. In the process, they've improved quality, outcomes, and patient safety. They've reduced length of stay, improved accessibility, reputation, profitability, and volume. And they've begun to address the seemingly never-ending list of complaints that the public has about the U.S. healthcare system.”

Topics: Community Health, Health Care, News