In the previous segment of our provider enablement blog series, we explored how the addition of specialized support roles like scribes, medical assistants, and AI tools can help support top-of-license work and why that’s so important. In this installation, we’ll discuss how top-of-license work leads to improved scores, lower readmission rates, better patient throughput, and overall better outcomes.
Provider enablement should prioritize direct care support, emphasizing the importance of quality, face-to-face interactions with patients above all else. This shift in focus improves quality of care, enabling providers to be more focused and less distracted. It also often restores the passion of the calling for providers, enabling them to do the work that is most impactful and important to them. Focus on point-of-care ultimately improves metrics such as Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS), patient survey scores, and readmission rates.
Surprisingly, perceived quality of care can be just as impactful as the health outcomes themselves. Often due to a change in aftercare adherence, patient outcomes themselves improve when patients feel they have a positive relationship with their care provider. A provider’s attention, time, patience, and empathy are all judged by patients, and the quality of the interaction can have a direct impact on quality of care.
This connection isn’t a new discovery. Consider the following excerpt from the Harvard Business Review nearly a decade ago:
Surveys consistently demonstrate that patients prioritize both the interpersonal attributes of their providers and their individual relationships with providers above all else. Doctors also ascribe great value to relationships. Kurt Stange, an expert in family medicine and health systems, calls relationships “the antidote to an increasingly fragmented and depersonalized health care system.”
Strong Patient-Provider Relationships Drive Healthier Outcomes
Erin E. Sullivan and Andy Ellner, MD
Providers who can focus directly on their patients, not multitasking or rushing to tackle other tasks, are associated with better patient outcomes. The 2020 study, Assessing the Longitudinal Impact of Physician-Patient Relationship on Functional Health, concluded that the better a patient-provider relationship, the more improved the patient’s functional health. Worse relationships resulted in worse outcomes.
Last year’s A model of contributors to a trusting patient-physician relationship: a critical review using a systematic search strategy, evaluated what physician factors contribute to patient trust, discovering that communication, active listening with eye contact, smiling, and the time patients and providers spent together were all important determining factors. Specifically highlighted was the fact that “physicians appearing rushed was a barrier to a trusting relationship.” All of these factors are more likely in happier providers with more time on their hands, not less.
The priority of care team design should be to clarify and support the provider-patient relationship, resulting in reduced readmissions, improved outcomes, and generally healthier populations on both sides of the relationship. That’s where the provider enablement ethos comes into play.
Our final installment of our Provider Enablement Blog Series will reflect on what we’ve covered in the series and how teams can begin adapting their strategies to better support provider enablement.
References
Lerch, Seraina Petra, et al. “A Model of Contributors to a Trusting Patient-Physician Relationship: A Critical Review Using a Systematic Search Strategy – BMC Primary Care.” BioMed Central, BioMed Central, 1 June 2024, bmcprimcare.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12875-024-02435-z.
Olaisen, R. Henry, et al. “Assessing the Longitudinal Impact of Physician-Patient Relationship on Functional Health.” Annals of Family Medicine, The Annals of Family Medicine, 1 Sept. 2020, www.annfammed.org/content/18/5/422.
Sullivan, Erin E., and Andy Ellner. “Strong Patient-Provider Relationships Drive Healthier Outcomes.” Harvard Business Review, Harvard Business Review, 9 Oct. 2015, hbr.org/2015/10/strong-patient-provider-relationships-drive-healthier-outcomes.
