Quit Wasting My Healthcare

Managing Patient Preferences

In the July/August publication of Healthcare Executive by the American College of Healthcare Executives, the cover article “Building Partnerships: Addressing overuse, underuse, and misuse of care” explains why poorly managed healthcare relationships create inappropriate care utilization.  One of the points in the article examines patient preferences as a source of utilization mismanagement:

“variation in care include physician-patient role confusion, inadequate decision support for patients and physicians, and financial incentives that bias decisions.”

However, the article also goes on to say that if properly managed, patient preference is a major force for encouraging care efficiency:

“The choice of care should be driven by the patient’s own preferences.  The practice of shared decision making (deciding treatment options based on a collaborative process between the patient and the provider) is becoming an essential component of healthcare delivery that will have many implications on how patients are treated.  Patients are becoming savvy consumers and require physicians to educate them on all aspects of the illness/disease, the variety of treatment options and the costs/benefits to allow the patient to make a final decision about which care path is the right one for them.”

Clearly, empowering consumers to drive value based healthcare decisions that increase care efficiency and lower costs is the key to a sustainable healthcare system.  This is why it is so critical to provide patients a support service such as Compass PHS where they receive the guidance and decision support to combat inappropriate financial incentives and role confusion.