The federal government and other healthcare stakeholders are increasingly interested in what is called "patient-centered care" as a measure of quality of care. The two go hand-in-hand, industry and government leaders say.
At a Monday briefing held in Washington, D.C., by the Commonwealth Fund and the Alliance for Health Reform, Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis said healthcare information technology is at the top of the list for driving patient-centered care.
"A way of promoting patient-centered care is to make sure tools and systems are in place including - first and foremost - information technology," Davis said.
"Patients want superb access to care, quality and safety but they want to be active in their care and partners in their care," Davis said. "A high-performing center of care would use modern information systems that support the provision of high-quality care as well as practice-based learning and quality improvement."
Charles Darby, head of the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) project at the Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, said the CAHPS program typically provides standardized surveys on patient-centered care that ask consumers and patients to report on their experiences with health care. The surveys focus specifically on factors such as communication with health care providers, the timeliness of care, and customer service.
Now the federal government plans to expand its monitoring of patient-centered care to include survey questions on how patients think healthcare information technology has an impact on quality of care, Darby said.
CAHPS surveys are currently used to measure the care of 138 million Americans participating in Medicare, Medicaid, the United States Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Defense, Darby said. More recently, 3,000 hospitals have voluntarily agreed to field the CAHPS survey to all their patients, not just Medicare and Medicaid patients, Darby said.
According to Darby, there has been a growing consensus around the measurement of patient-centered care. The CAHPS program could become the trusted agent that various users could draw information from and use for their own purposes.
In spring 2007, AHRQ plans to release the new CAHPS Clinician & Group Survey, which will enable survey sponsors nationwide to collect and use standardized information on patients' experiences with their physicians and their offices, AHRQ reports on its website.
In a related topic, a study released Tuesday by the LeapFrog Group showed that hospitals that put patients first foster a safer patient care environment. The Leapfrog Hospital Quality and Safety Survey collected data from hospitals on their progress toward implementing practices in several categories endorsed by the National Quality Forum. One of these categories was whether a hospital has a computerized physician order entry system that requires physicians to enter prescriptions and other orders into computers linked to error prevention software, a LeapFrog statement said.