Patient involvement and experience will be dominated by consumerism in healthcare, health equity, and communication techniques in the coming year. Beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists will be attempting to understand how they can address patient demands in the long run in 2022.
- Exposure: Nearly two years after the novel coronavirus exposes stark health disparities, organizations will be pushed to assess where there are gaps in their own offerings. Clinicians and healthcare leaders alike should prepare to measure clinical quality by patient demographic to help inform quality improvement efforts.
- Reconsideration: Additionally, providers will have to reconsider how they communicate with and educate their patients. Throughout the pandemic, healthcare has seen medical and scientific advice become deeply politicized, changing the dynamic in patient education and communication.
- Report: According to a December 2021 report from Press Ganey, an organization’s online presence will be crucial to patient loyalty. Clinics and hospital systems should ensure the information they have listed online—office hours, accepted insurance, offered services—is accurate as patients increasingly look online before booking an appointment.
- Digitalization: “On a societal level, the pandemic forced us to rethink the digitalization of healthcare,” Daniel Litwer, chief client officer, Press Ganey, said in a public statement about the report. “This new era reinforces the power that online perception is reality, and failure to invest in digital channels will push patients to seek care elsewhere.”
- Survey: The Leapfrog Group will ask survey respondents about whether they collect data stratified by demographic group. For this first year of updated surveying, The Leapfrog Group said it is on a fact-finding mission.“We had to recognize, for us as an organization, what we can do to contribute to the improvement and finally achieving health equity in this country,” Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group, said in a March 2021 interview.
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