Press Ganey Hospital Pulse Report 2009 – Supporting caregiver involvement

Press Ganey Hospital Pulse Report 2009 – I know, I am always looking at data like this with a few things in mind, and those things are here:

• Patient Satisfaction is up in hospitals
• Priority #3 of the top 5 (on page 3 of the report) is “Staff effort to include you in decisions about your treatment” – I’d add “you and your family” since it’s more and more clear that every hospitalized patient needs an advocate involved in their care.
• “Staff attitude toward visitors” is highly correlated to recommending a hospital
• Hospitals that are recommended by employees and physicians are recommended by patients, too (I am careful to avoid causality here – employee satisfaction can flow from patient satisfaction as much as the other way around)

It’s no secret that I think that the inpatient setting is the next frontier of patient and family access to their data through personal health records. Could accelerating that momentum help with the priorities above?

I learned yesterday that the State of Virginia allows hospitals to charge up to $ 0.50 a page for medical records. At least you might pay $0.23 less there for the opacity of your data relative to DC. Hmm..maybe we should make a state-by-state map.

And a nod to Press Ganey for their modern approach to sharing their work so that others may benefit:

All material is considered free and open source. Full or partial copies may be made and distributed provided all information is properly attributed to Press Ganey Associates, Inc.

Proper citation:

© 2009 by Press Ganey Associates, Inc. Hospital Pulse Report 2009: Patient Perspectives on American Health Care. South Bend, Indiana