Soon Medicare will begin to decrease financial reimbursement for hospitals with low patient satisfaction scores, giving healthcare providers another incentive to perform better. The extra funds will be distributed to hospitals with above-average scores(1). In addition to streamlining work processes, improving efficiencies, and holding down costs, ongoing developments in health information technology provide unique ways for hospitals to increase patient satisfaction.

 

Smart technology, for example, has an additive effect on realized benefits through improved patient-tracking mechanisms, smart medication pumps, and smart patient rooms. Patient tracking is a particularly important tool for increasing patient satisfaction scores. Many patients report dissatisfaction in the amount of time it takes to get from a hospital emergency department to an inpatient room or from an inpatient room to a diagnostic testing room and back again. Similarly, many patients complain about the amount of time it takes to receive medication for pain relief after their request. Tracking helps alleviate these issues by allowing healthcare providers to examine the amount of time that passes between a patient pressing a call light and their request being met.

 

Smart medication pumps communicate directly with hospital, pharmacy, and medication-administration systems to pull in data related to allergies, drug interactions, dosages and appropriate administration rates. This medication-delivery innovation also incorporates alarms, improving system and patient safety.

 

Smart rooms have a direct impact on patient satisfaction. They provide patients with information on who has entered their room, the title of their care giver, and the care to be rendered. Voice recognition features in smart rooms also allow patients to verbally place phone calls, request information, and activate the nurse-call system with ease. Smart room technology helps reduce redundancy, both in how a patient’s requests are handled and in information sharing related to a patient’s health status, and allows nurses and doctors to document a patient’s status while in the room. This decreases the probability of error through repetition of health history information and patient preferences as well as time consumption, allowing care providers to spend more time with their patients.

 

To realize the maximum potential of these and other health information technologies on improving patient satisfaction scores, each healthcare setting should have at least one informatics nurse specialist (INS). There are many levels of informatics nurses, but the INS is distinguished from the others by having formal graduate preparation in nursing informatics. This preparation enables an INS to leverage clinical and informatics expertise to contribute to the design, integration, and effective implementation of information technologies, increasing patient satisfaction and safety.

 

Once smart technologies are acquired by an organization, an INS ensures that the application works as designed and supports patient care to the greatest extent possible. An INS designs, develops, and implements teaching-learning activities that support all clinical staff in learning to use and optimize these technologies. Beyond maximizing payments from new reimbursement models, an INS also works with clinicians to optimize new health information technologies to generate real-time data that can be mined to develop strategies for improving patient satisfaction. This role is integral in creating an organization focused on patient advocacy, re-design of workflow, and use of aggregate data for data mining and knowledge generation.

 

These tools allow healthcare professionals to create reports for improving patient outcomes and healthcare delivery, which should positively impact post-discharge patient-satisfaction scores.