Patient journey good measure of medical service quality

A patient’s journey entails the path taken through a health facility as they seek clinical services. This can be a good measure of the level of quality and can guide healthcare managers in reducing adverse outcomes. It can also help stem client complaints.

The usual sequence for a patient seeking clinical services involves entrance, reception, consultation, investigation, drugs dispensation and if required, admission then discharges and exit.

At the entrance, reception and consultation, one useful marker of effectiveness and efficiency is the client waiting time. Often, long waiting times are the most common triggers of patients’ dissatisfaction.

Therefore, healthcare managers should deploy tools such as queue management systems for measuring waiting times and instituting corrective actions to reduce unnecessary delays.

At the investigation, a key marker is the accuracy of results. For example, in a laboratory setup, quality control measures need to be instituted to ensure the high accuracy of results. It’s no wonder that one of the common causes for litigation in healthcare in Kenya is wrong investigation results.

Certainly, client waiting time between sample collection and relaying of results is also critical. At drugs dispensation, a critical marker is the drug fill rate. This is the proportion of drugs issued to patients versus the number of those prescribed.

One common trigger of patient dissatisfaction is missing drugs that have been prescribed to them to cure illness due to pharmacy stockouts.

Therefore, healthcare managers should institute practices such as full adherence to health facility drug formularies. If and when admission for inpatient care is required, key areas to focus on include admission and discharge turnaround times and most importantly, patient experience during the hospital stay.