Since the early days of the pandemic, the healthcare industry has faced seemingly insurmountable challenges to ensure access to high-quality care. While healthcare providers have performed admirably in the face of these challenges, patients are still seeing access challenges that are impacting their behaviors — which can lead to challenges in the long run.
In the 2022 BDO Patient Experience Survey, they sought to learn how patients feel about their providers and healthcare experience — from making appointments and interacting with care providers, to how patients access health insurance and who patients turn to for routine care.
From the survey of over 3,000 U.S. adults, they came across a few key takeaways:
1. Delaying routine care is the new norm
Americans face a troubling dilemma: While 92% have health insurance and 91% have a regular care provider, 58% admit to delaying routine medical care in the past 12 months.
For routine (non-emergency) care, 69% of respondents report seeing a primary care physician and 12% routinely visit primary care nurse/nurse practitioner or physician assistant. Just 9% do not have a provider for routine medical care. Our survey found that Americans use a wide variety of health insurance options with employer-sponsored insurance (32%) being the most popular, followed by Medicare (28%), Medicaid (14%) and individual private insurance (7%). While 8% report having no health insurance, even those with insurance faced significant barriers to care.
Of those who delayed seeking medical care in the past 12 months, 30% cite unaffordability due to high out-of-pocket costs and 19% say they could not afford to seek care due to a lack of insurance. In addition to the high costs of medical care, many Americans struggle with a lack of cost transparency.
2. Cost transparency is a continuing problem
Nearly a third of Americans (31%) have never tried to obtain cost estimates for medical care. When patients do not know what healthcare will cost, many avoid seeking necessary care. A critical way we can improve patient access to healthcare is to understand how patients like to obtain cost estimates.
Of patients surveyed who have sought cost estimates, most prefer to reach out to a person, with 38% preferring to contact their insurance provider and 37% opting to ask the healthcare provider’s administrative staff. On the digital side, 31% say they obtained cost estimates by looking at online patient portals and 27% look to health provider or medical facility websites.
3. Most patients experience frustration when seeking and receiving care
We know that long appointments lead times and high costs cause patients to put off care — but how do patients feel about the actual care they receive? 69% of Americans experience frustration during routine medical appointments, with having to wait for a late provider (29%), not getting enough time with the provider (22%) and having too much paperwork to fill out (21%) being the most common frustrations.
When providers make it easier for patients to receive care, their efforts are noticed. Patients say providers make care more accessible by offering telehealth appointments (32%), reaching out to proactively schedule appointments (29%), offering walk-in appointments (27%) and implementing online/self-service scheduling (23%).
Patients are facing a challenging care environment — and so are providers. Fortunately, there are ways that providers can improve access and the care experience for their patients without breaking their budgets.
A thought-provoking piece in this week’s Harvard Business Review about the underrated advantages longstanding industry giants have over disruptors got us thinking about health system strategy. The authors highlighted several companies that have enjoyed sustained success over a century or more, including agricultural behemoth Deere and Company, and shipping giant company A.P. Møller-Maersk, which wielded “strategic incumbency” to successfully innovate and pursue new strategies, leveraging scale, trusted customer relationships, and long-term planning capabilities—attributes that new market entrants often lack when looking to disrupt established consumer channels.
The Gist: In a market where healthcare unicorns constantly garner headlines, the article offers a counterintuitive perspective about the value of incumbency.
Health system leaders might look to the experience of Maersk, which moved from a supply-driven focus (pushing its products to customers), to a demand-driven strategy (navigating customers through logistical pain points), using technology to maximize its vast asset portfolio.
Likewise, health systems have an abundant “supply” of care delivery assets, and now need to build the connective tissue to make the care experience across those point solutions seamless for patients.
Some pundits claim that current reporting on COVID hospital admissions is overly pessimistic, failing to account for a distinction between patients admitted explicitly “for COVID”, and those admitted for other reasons who also, incidentally, have COVID. The latter now comprise up to half of some health systems’ COVID patients.
In an article in The Atlantic this week, reporter Ed Yong rejects this dichotomy, on the grounds that it ignores both the significant number of people for whom COVID exacerbates underlying chronic conditions, as well as the challenges any patient with COVID poses to hospitals. As he points out, those patients still require isolation and special safety measures, further worsening the burden on an already-strained staff.
The Gist: For hospitals, dealing with endemic COVID will mean establishing strategies to manage COVID-positive patients without postponing much needed non-emergency care, and without overly taxing a stretched workforce. Downplaying the burden of “incidental COVID” is not helpful, but sustaining operations while on perpetual crisis footing will prove untenable.
The healthcare industry’s staffing shortage crisis has had clear consequences for care delivery and efficiency, forcing some health systems to pause nonemergency surgeries or temporarily close facilities. Less understood is how these shortages are affecting care quality and patient safety.
A mix of high COVID-19 patient volume and staff departures amid the pandemic has put hospitals at the heart of a national staffing shortage, but there is little national data available to quantify the shortages’ effects on patient care.
The first hint came last month from a CDC report that found healthcare-associated infections increased significantly in 2020 after years of steady decline. Researchers attributed the increase to challenges related to the pandemic, including staffing shortages and high patient volumes, which limited hospitals’ ability to follow standard infection control practices.
“That’s probably one of the first real pieces of data — from a large scale dataset — that we’ve seen that gives us some sense of direction of where we’ve been headed with the impact of patient outcomes as a result of the pandemic,” Patricia McGaffigan, RN, vice president of safety programs for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, told Becker’s. “I think we’re still trying to absorb much of what’s really happening with the impact on patients and families.”
An opaque view into national safety trends
Because of lags in data reporting and analysis, the healthcare industry lacks clear insights into the pandemic’s effect on national safety trends.
National data on safety and quality — such as surveys of patient safety culture from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality — can often lag by several quarters to a year, according to Ms. McGaffigan.
“There [have been] some declines in some of those scores more recently, but it does take a little while to be able to capture those changes and be able to put those changes in perspective,” she said. “One number higher or lower doesn’t necessarily indicate a trend, but it is worth really evaluating really closely.”
For example, 569 sentinel events were reported to the Joint Commission in the first six months of 2021, compared to 437 for the first six months of 2020. However, meaningful conclusions about the events’ frequency and long-term trends cannot be drawn from the dataset, as fewer than 2 percent of all sentinel events are reported to the Joint Commission, the organization estimates.
“We may never have as much data as we want,” said Leah Binder, president and CEO of the Leapfrog Group. She said a main area of concern is CMS withholding certain data amid the pandemic. Previously, the agency has suppressed data for individual hospitals during local crises, but never on such a wide scale, according to Ms. Binder.
CMS collects and publishes quality data for more than 4,000 hospitals nationwide. The data is refreshed quarterly, with the next update scheduled for October. This update will include additional data for the fourth quarter of 2020.
“It is important to note that CMS provided a blanket extraordinary circumstances exception for Q1 and Q2 2020 data due to the COVID-19 pandemic where data was not required nor reported,” a CMS spokesperson told Becker’s. “In addition, some current hospital data will not be publicly available until about July 2022, while other data will not be available until January 2023 due to data exceptions, different measure reporting periods and the way in which CMS posts data.”
Hospitals that closely monitor their own datasets in more near-term windows may have a better grasp of patient safety trends at a local level. However, their ability to monitor, analyze and interpret that data largely depends on the resources available, Ms. McGaffigan said. The pandemic may have sidelined some of that work for hospitals, as clinical or safety leaders had to shift their priorities and day-to-day activities.
“There are many other things besides COVID-19 that can harm patients,” Ms. Binder told Becker’s. “Health systems know this well, but given the pandemic, have taken their attention off these issues. Infection control and quality issues are not attended to at the level of seriousness we need them to be.”
What health systems should keep an eye on
While the industry is still waiting for definitive answers on how staffing shortages have affected patient safety, Ms. Binder and Ms. McGaffigan highlighted a few areas of concern they are watching closely.
The first is the effect limited visitation policies have had on families — and more than just the emotional toll. Family members and caregivers are a critical player missing in healthcare safety, according to Ms. Binder.
When hospitals don’t allow visitors, loved ones aren’t able to contribute to care, such as ensuring proper medication administration or communication. Many nurses have said they previously relied a lot on family support and vigilance. The lack of extra monitoring may contribute to the increasing stress healthcare providers are facing and open the door for more medical errors.
Which leads Ms. Binder to her second concern — a culture that doesn’t always respect and prioritize nurses. The pandemic has underscored how vital nurses are, as they are present at every step of the care journey, she continued.
To promote optimal care, hospitals “need a vibrant, engaged and safe nurse workforce,” Ms. Binder said. “We don’t have that. We don’t have a culture that respects nurses.”
Diagnostic accuracy is another important area to watch, Ms. McGaffigan said. Diagnostic errors — such as missed or delayed diagnoses, or diagnoses that are not effectively communicated to the patient — were already one of the most sizable care quality challenges hospitals were facing prior to the pandemic.
“It’s a little bit hard to play out what that crystal ball is going to show, but it is in particular an area that I think would be very, very important to watch,” she said.
Another area to monitor closely is delayed care and its potential consequences for patient outcomes, according to Ms. McGaffigan. Many Americans haven’t kept up with preventive care or have had delays in accessing care. Such delays could not only worsen patients’ health conditions, but also disengage them and prevent them from seeking care when it is available.
Reinvigorating safety work: Where to start
Ms. McGaffigan suggests healthcare organizations looking to reinvigorate their safety work go back to the basics. Leaders should ensure they have a clear understanding of what their organization’s baseline safety metrics are and how their safety reports have been trending over the past year and a half.
“Look at the foundational aspects of what makes care safe and high-quality,” she said. “Those are very much linked to a lot of the systems, behaviors and practices that need to be prioritized by leaders and effectively translated within and across organizations and care teams.”
She recommended healthcare organizations take a total systems approach to their safety work, by focusing on the following four, interconnected pillars:
Culture, leadership and governance
Patient and family engagement
Learning systems
Workforce safety
For example, evidence shows workforce safety is an integral part of patient safety, but it’s not an area that’s systematically measured or evaluated, according to Ms. McGaffigan. Leaders should be aware of this connection and consider whether their patient safety reporting systems address workforce safety concerns or, instead, add on extra work and stress for their staff.
Safety performance can slip when team members get busy or burdensome work is added to their plates, according to Ms. McGaffigan. She said leaders should be able to identify and prioritize the essential value-added work that must go on at an organization to ensure patients and families will have safe passage through the healthcare system and that care teams are able to operate in the safest and healthiest work environments.
In short, leaders should ask themselves: “What is the burdensome work people are being asked to absorb and what are the essential elements that are associated with safety that you want and need people to be able to stay on top of,” she said.
To improve both staffing shortages and quality of care, health systems must bring nurses higher up in leadership and into C-suite roles, Ms. Binder said. Giving nurses more authority in hospital decisions will make everything safer. Seattle-based Virginia Mason Hospital recently redesigned its operations around nurse priorities and subsequently saw its quality and safety scores go up, according to Ms. Binder.
“If it’s a good place for a nurse to go, it’s a good place for a patient to go,” Ms. Binder said, noting that the national nursing shortage isn’t just a numbers game; it requires a large culture shift.
Hospitals need to double down on quality improvement efforts, Ms. Binder said. “Many have done the opposite, for good reason, because they are so focused on COVID-19. Because of that, quality improvement efforts have been reduced.”
Ms. Binder urged hospitals not to cut quality improvement staff, noting that this is an extraordinarily dangerous time for patients, and hospitals need all the help they can get monitoring safety. Hospitals shouldn’t start to believe the notion that somehow withdrawing focus on quality will save money or effort.
“It’s important that the American public knows that we are fighting for healthcare quality and safety — and we have to fight for it, we all do,” Ms. Binder concluded. “We all have to be vigilant.”
Conclusion
The true consequences of healthcare’s labor shortage on patient safety and care quality will become clear once more national data is available. If the CDC’s report on rising HAI rates is any harbinger of what’s to come, it’s clear that health systems must place renewed focus and energy on safety work — even during something as unprecedented as a pandemic.
The irony isn’t lost on Ms. Binder: Amid a crisis driven by infectious disease, U.S. hospitals are seeing higher rates of other infections.
“A patient dies once,” she concluded. “They can die from COVID-19 or C. diff. It isn’t enough to prevent one.”
Hospitals in the future will look far more tech-enabled and consumer-focused — when patients are actually even getting care in a hospital building itself.
Why it matters: Hospitals were already pushing morecare outside their four walls before the pandemic. COVID accelerated that shift, forcing hospitals to reimagine what’s possible to deliver in patients’ homes, experts say.
The big picture: One way to picture what hospitals of the future will look like is to look at two brand new hospital buildings opened this fall by competing Pennsylvania health systems.
The buildings, by Penn Medicine and Highmark Health both offer hotel-like amenities such as better food, streaming services, and better-positioned outlets for cell phone charging. They’ve also made medical records more accessible to patients, executives say.
But they were also designed with the belief that, in the future, only the most complex care might be delivered in them.
State of play: Every medical room in Penn Medicine’s new $1.6 billion health pavilion can be turned into an ICU-capable room when needed.
It added 7% in costs to the project, but made sense considering the ICU demands of the pandemic and “not knowing what the future will be,” CEO Kevin Mahoney told Axios.
The hospital also offers patients bedside tablets that allow patients to control the light and temperature of the room, and to activate frosted privacy glass on the doors of their rooms.
The benefits are two-fold: patients really like it and it can help free up staff to focus on more critical tasks, Mahoney said.
“The pandemic was an amplifier for natural trends that were already starting to develop,” Highmark CEO David Holmberg told Axios. “The complexity of medical procedures [in hospitals] is going to be significantly higher.”
The bottom line: Tech advances will change the entire hospital experience no matter where the care is delivered.
Wearables will provide digital biomarkers to allow better patient monitoring from the home. “Smart” infrastructure will help patients find parking and navigate massive hospital campuses when they need to go into the hospital.
And 5G will allow doctors to pull up massive amounts of personalized data on a wireless screen in seconds, Hon Pak, chief medical officer at Samsung Electronics told Axios.
“The perspective we want to bring to the smart hospital is it’s not just about caring for the condition or the disease, but it’s about caring for the whole,” Pak said.
The North Carolina attorney general’s office received 116 complaints about Asheville, N.C.-based Mission Health over a 12-month period, WLOS reported June 8.
WLOS reported that most of the complaints were related to billing issues, 23 percent were concerns over quality of care, 16 percent were related to cost of service, 7 percent were from employees or former employees of Mission Health and 5 percent were related to charity care requirements.
“It’s a concerning number, 116 over a year,” Attorney General Josh Stein told WLOS. “That’s a lot, so we’re sharing our serious concerns with the management of the health system and we are going to be on top of this to the extent we possibly can.”
Mr. Stein told the publication that his office recently dedicated one of his employees to keeping track of all the complaints about Mission Health.
Mission Health was acquired by Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare in 2019. HCA agreed to certain commitments as part of the deal, including keeping major Mission Health facilities open and continuing to provide certain services.
Since the acquisition, there have been a number of physician exits from the health system, and an independent monitor is looking into the reason behind the exits.
Mission Health shared the following statement with WLOS:
“Since January of 2021, we are aware of 15 complaints made to the Attorney General’s office, nine of which were related to billing and all of which have been resolved. We address every issue the Attorney General’s office brings to our attention promptly—both with them and the patient. Our patient care is our first priority. We strongly encourage everyone to contact us directly any time there is a concern so we can address it with them immediately and personally.
“Going back to 2020, the majority of billing concerns were made shortly after acquisition of Mission and primarily regarded questions around changes to medical practice operations and a variety of billing issues all of which were resolved. Any patient or guarantor with billing questions or concerns should contact 833-323-0834 and we are happy to discuss, answer any questions you may have, and seek resolution where needed. Further, we have an email address, contactmission@hcahealthcare.com, where people can reach out to us on any matter.”
HENRY KOTULA 