How To Deliver Value-based Care as a General Clinician

Healthcare center managers worry about delivering value-based care for patients every time. Value-based care refers to quality outcomes in a health institution, resulting in enhanced patient satisfaction, empowered patients, and reduced misdiagnosis incidences. Clinicians should adopt such a model because it is a sustainable way of operating clinics and reduces operational costs.

Clinics can spare themselves from unnecessary spending by implementing a value-based care model that fits their structure. One-fifth of healthcare spending is avoidable if there are proper systems in place to prevent patient harm or eliminate non-value add care. You can have value-based care by adjusting your clinical practices to improve patients’ experience. 

The following steps can make a difference in quality outcomes in a clinic.

Organize Care Around Patient Needs

To influence patient quality outcomes, you must know what their needs are. Visitors to clinics seeking medical care are likely to be in distress and looking to alleviate their suffering. The patient emotional state is fragile, needing empathy while handling them. Failure to recognize this need usually leads to poor outcomes for the patient.

The patient’s delicate condition also means they want to receive a seamless service free of delays. Waiting makes the clinic visitors agitated, compromising the quality outcomes the clinic anticipates. You can organize care around patients to ensure they receive a courteous and speedy service delivery.

The clinic manager can anticipate some patients’ needs but needs to collect feedback to incorporate other unknown ones. Some patients would need special care because of the ailments they suffer from, age, or other dispositions unique to them. Armed with such information, you can fully understand the patient’s condition and well-being needs.

Design a Thorough Treatment Regimen

Designing a thorough treatment regimen for a patient enhances their confidence in the clinic. Research on supplementary or complimentary treatment methods to provide patients with excellent experiences. For example, a patient with migraine obtains not just medication but also some physical therapy, relaxation techniques, or even psychological counseling.

Patients like to feel that their condition has received a thorough assessment before diagnosis and administering a treatment protocol. Assess records of successful treatment regimens and replicate them on other patients with the same conditions. For return patients, always inquire about the outcomes of the medication they took to establish their successes.

Exhaustive diagnostic processes eliminate treatment errors that result in an enhanced reputation of the clinic and prevent costs associated with correcting them. Stay up-to-date with the latest treatment for various conditions so that your patients always benefit from the best available options for better outcomes.  

Form Learning Teams

Handling service provision in a healthcare institution requires multifaceted skill sets of staff. People attending to patients should be knowledgeable, proficient, discerning, and empathetic, among other service attributes. You will probably find it challenging to get multi-skilled staff in all aspects. The alternative is recruiting multidisciplinary team members to provide whole-person care.

Each recruitment in your clinic should take cognizance of the required skills to provide quality outcomes. Some institutions only focus on the technical knowledge of recruits and neglect essential soft skills needed for a great customer experience for the patients. Focus on balancing the soft and hard skills of patient attendants in your clinic. 

A learning program in the clinic can also enhance team skills. You can plan capacity-building and training sessions with your team to reinforce their adeptness or develop non-existing expertise. The daily experiences in the clinic also provide insights into the capacity gaps that inform the learning programs.

Quantify Health Outcomes and Costs

It is challenging to manage what you cannot measure. It is critical to quantify health outcomes and costs in your clinic to enable you to track progress over time. Establish the essential data you need for computing the efficiency of the clinical operations. Such data will help you generate operational efficiency reports for particular periods.

The payments and receipts data are great starting points for assessing operations. You will need to ask, what is revenue cycle management to your clinic? The cycle management helps you keep track of billing, accounts receivable, and revenue. By retrieving the revenue cycle data, you can delineate the value-add and non-value add activities. Enabling bundled payment models for multiple providers to be reimbursed together instead of individual payments is one way of optimizing a revenue management process.

Staff need not spend countless hours on single transactions, freeing them up for other value-add activities. A fast back-end process also means patients are served speedily at the front-end, enhancing quality outcomes.

Deliver Value-Based Care

Delivering value-based care in clinics is achievable through consistent practices. You can start with a quality assessment of your clinic to identify aspects that need improvement. Make a priority action list and identify the low-hanging fruits that result in quick wins when implemented. You then progressively implement the others until you achieve the desired quality outcomes.