Patient-centric or hospital-centric healthcare
As of
January of this year, I have been daily in the hospital, partly for myself and
mostly for visiting my mother (who did brake her hip).
This
article focuses on the experience with my own health issue. Since April 2013 I am having some breathing
issues, especially when I do some physical exercise. However, it is good to
know that I do daily some sports since my 6th year or so.
After
a few visits to my doctor, I was send to this newly opened (January 2014)
hospital in my hometown. I have visited the cardiologist a few times, did a CT
scan and bike exercises. After that I did many lung tests and visited the
lung-specialist. Each time the specialist did give me a vague description of
his conclusions and told me to discuss the progress with my doctor. Each
specialist is strictly sticking to his own area of expertise and says nothing
about possible other causes. I know because I did ask the respective specialist
and each time they responded that they did have a hunch, but were not allowed
to ‘pass the border’ into other areas of my body.
So,
it is clear that this approach is very distant to the holistic view of a human
being. Let alone the connection with and influence of the mind on our own
health.
Also
this brand new hospital is organized in different departments, as if we can
slice up a human body and each slice can and will function on its own. These
specialists are quite aware of this anomaly, but they say that the insurance
companies and the hospital limit them. Some were even quite frustrated with
this approach.
Customer
(patient)-centricity is a buzzword in business and in healthcare for many years
now, but it is a fact that hospital-centricity wins. This is really incredible!
Just
as worse is the communication. The design of the offices of the specialists
(heart; lungs) is done in such a way that when they look at the screen of their
pc’s, they can not see the patient. This is again an example of the priority of
hospital procedures over human contact.
I was even joking that one of those specialists would not recognize me
as I would turn up an hour later. He would not notice that I had been there an
hour ago, as he never looked me into my eyes.
One
of the most frustrating approaches is that these specialist type up their
conclusions, and they give you a very limited piece of information only. Then
they do send this conclusion to my doctor and from him I do get the real
conclusion and test results. Maybe this habit is from a long time ago when most
patients were illiterate. But these days, many patients are very well informed
about their health issue (upfront) and should be able to understand the
conclusions of the specialists. Throughout my life I have never been qualified
as dumb, but now I know how it feels like that. This is again a sad example
giving more importance to hospital-centricity than to patient-centricity.
Now,
people in healthcare might argue that this approach is driven from a
cost-savings point of view. I am convinced that this silo-approach is much more
expensive, much more frustrating for the patients and it takes much more time
to come to a workable outcome. Finally, they did conclude that I have some form
of asthma and they prescribed some medicine, which is work fine. This whole
process took a year, costs a lot of money and could have been concluded in a
month. If you would have put me and some of the most relevant specialists in a
room for half an hour, have an open discussion and maybe do some tests, the
conclusion would have emerged quickly and naturally.
It is
clear that there is lots of room for innovation in healthcare!
Enthusiasm drives Excellence!
