Question: How can hospitals improve health outcomes?
Nicholas LaRusso: Increasingly we’re going to have a much more demanding set of consumers in health care. That’s going to result in, and that’s the good thing, that’s going to result in the need for us to be able to make transparent to them the concrete outcomes of what it is we’re providing.
For example, if a patient needs a liver transplant, they’re going to be able to go online and find out who does the most transplants? Who does the most transplants from my particular condition? What they should be able to find out is, what’s the approximate range of cost? And what’s the likelihood that I’m going to get out of the hospital in a week, two weeks, three weeks? How many patients that have this kind of a transplant need another operation?
These are the outcomes that we have to be accountable for, and that we need to make transparent to the public. I think that’s the right thing to do.
If we believe, and we do at Mayo, the Mayo mantra which is the needs of the patient come first. They have to be fully informed and we have to be held accountable for the outcomes of the things that we do.
Recorded on: June 24, 2009.
Discuss
Laura Gordon on July 2, 2009, 2:51 PM
I wish that LaRusso had talked more specifically about tools for rating your doctor. As a consumer of health services I feel that I have very little voice for giving my opinion on the service that I am getting – and very few sources for information about future “purchases.”
I recall that Angie’s List recently started releasing information on Dr.s, but many physicians had concerns about the accuracy of those reports. People do have a bias for rating experiences when they are either very positive or very negative.
But what about a regulated mandatory system for rating Dr’s immediately after patient visits?
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