Using high patient satisfaction results to your advantage when negotiating a new managed care contract for the hospital
Top patient satisfaction results are often used to convince the public and potential clients that the services that the facility offers are superior and would lead to improvement in the patient outcomes. When negotiating for a new managed care contract, the organization or individual making the negotiation often tend to have an emphasis on the quality of services that the facility would issue to their members and the discounts that they would receive.
However, there are a set of ethical standards that the facility would need to look into. First, patient satisfaction results need to be honest and recent. That is, the results should have been the last taken and should have been filled in by the clients attended to by the facility. Second, the data should adhere to the principle of confidentiality.
The bio-data of the patients who took part in filling the patient satisfaction survey need to be hidden and only relevant statics issued to the concerned patients to make a decision on whether to sign for the new managed care contract. Third, the data should not be exploitative regarding the agreement that the facility would need to establish with the entity to whom they enter with to the new contract.
Qualitative and Quantitative Data
The qualitative data that can be sought when investigating how to improve the market share of a hospital include interviews, narrative-based medicine, and observation-based methods. Narrative-Based medicine enables the physicians to establish a patient-centered approach that would be critical to the improvement of healthcare decisions that are sought by the given facility (Launer, 2017).
The interviews can either be structured or semi-structured. They can also be used in the determination of the experiences that the patients had within the facility and the attitudes that they have towards the hospital staff and the quality of service delivery. Such information would be used in the improvement of the services that the facility offers, leading to an increased preference of the facility by patients. Consequently, the market share of the facility would tend to rise.
Quantitative data often is critical in the assessment of the quality of services that the facility offers to its patients. The quantitative data include the patients admitted in the wards, newly born deliveries, emergency room visits, Quarterly financial income within the facility and the hospital discharge volume.
Such is essential in the examination of the extent to which the target clients prefer the set of services that are preferred the facility. Such can then lead to proper decision making on the measures that could be undertaken to improve on the overall healthcare outcome of the patients, the value that the patients would need and the costing strategy that the medical facility would need to seek.
Conclusion
Concisely, data, both qualitative and quantitative is essential in the overall improvement of the set of services that are issued by a medical facility. However, the strategies that a medical facility chooses needs to anchor on the principles of accessibility, quality, and cost. Medical facilities should issue quality services at affordable rates and find creative ways through which they would improve access to the set of services that they offer to their target markets.