Why patient satisfaction is important economically - Essay Example

Why patient satisfaction is important economically? Introduction Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) is a way of measuring patient’s perceptions of their hospital experience. There are three most important objectives of HCAHPS (US Department of Health & Human Services, 2011). The first objective is to come up with data of patient’s perspective of care that will help obtain what is important to the customers. The second objective is to create report that will help hospitals improve their service care.

The third objective is to come up with public report to enhance accountability, transparency and quality of care out of the public investment made. It is therefore clear that there is indeed an attempt to improve or achieve patient satisfaction in health care. It is therefore essential to understand that in health care, it is not just important to consider generation of profit, but from an economic perspective patient satisfaction should be above all. Patients: Sources of health care providers’ income Patients are the ones who are served by various health care providers.

Patients help the latter to generate their income. Thus, there are various economic incentives that help to achieve or generate user satisfaction. One of these incentives is on quality of professional life that tries to encourage physicians to realize their burden for their patients. However, this move is said to only increase the expectations of health care professionals to long for strong structure of management support that may only end up giving negative impact on the user’s satisfaction (Badia et al., 2007). With too much expectation from health care practitioners, it is important that they too expect higher from the management particularly for support.

The management on the other hand is trying to achieve maximization of profit in great detail, but economic incentives simply need to incur additional costs or expenses. As a result, the overall price for health care service is usually shouldered by customers. Thus, it is important to understand that in the US the basic characteristic of a quality health care is usually associated with high cost. The importance of feedback mechanism Another important move to ensure patient satisfaction in health care services is to exactly know their feedbacks, perceptions and expectations.

Patients’ feedbacks, perceptions and expectations help health care providers to serve the best for their patients. Satisfied patients tend to seek the best health care providers that could meet their expectations. The HCAHPS tries to capture the real perception of patients about what a quality health care should be all about. There are various incentives that can be done in this feedback mechanism that hope to ensure customer satisfaction. These feedbacks when they are to be reported to the public should encourage health care providers to be transparent with their operation especially on the improvement of health care services.

Furthermore, there is a good chance to ensure customer satisfaction at a highest level without giving too much emphasis on how much profit should be generated on the side of health care providers. There are still other more important impacts on having feedback mechanism, but the most important point of it is to know the level of its reliability. Thus, this feedback mechanism should be far from the influence of health care providers so as to ensure patients’ perspectives of a quality health care that could satisfy them are dealt with accordingly.

References Badia, J. G., Babiano, G. E., Corrales, M. S., Colom, L. S., Menguy, F. A., Pena, C. A., de Puelles, P. G. (2007). Impact of economic incentives on quality of professional life and on end-user satisfaction. Health Policy, 80, 2-10. US Department of Health & Human Services (2011). HCAHPS: Patients’ Perspectives of Care Survey Retrieved June 28, 2011, from https://www.cms.gov/HospitalQualityInits/30_HospitalHCAHPS.asp