The relationship between healthcare service provision models and patient experience

Improving the healthcare user experience: an optimization model grounded in patient-centredness

BACKGROUND

Patient satisfaction and experience are key outcomes of healthcare and can be computed as powerful measures of service quality. Understand what affects them is essential for service quality improvement. Investigating whether the care setting (i.e., medical or surgical) can impact the patients' perception of the quality can be also important for the actionability of this data. The aim is to explore which experiential factors should be prioritized to improve patient satisfaction with hospitalization service, using experience items as intermediate results and considering different settings.

METHODS

Patient-reported experience measures are used in an Italian region. This study uses the optimization approach to identify factors of healthcare user experience affecting and enhancing satisfaction.

RESULTS

The results confirm that, among the significant determinants of satisfaction, some specific experiential aspects emerged as the potential primary focus to be prioritized in improvement actions. These aspects vary according to the specific departmental area.

CONCLUSIONS

The study presents an optimization model directly informed by healthcare service users, utilizing their insights to drive healthcare delivery improvements. It emphasizes the necessity of not only collect patient perspectives but also applying different methodologies to understand what matters to patients and what interventions could be prioritized, and to strategically use diverse insights to enhance the delivery of healthcare services and patient experience and satisfaction.

Performance measurement and user-centeredness in the healthcare sector: Opening the black box adapting the framework of Donabedian

The framework of Donabedian is widely applied to performance assessment at the healthcare system level. Donabedian categorised the care quality measurement around three dimensions, namely structure, process, and outcomes. The first dimension concerns the inputs; the second one, the combinations of factors and inputs; the last one, the effectiveness in terms of patients' health status. Donabedian early included in the last dimension the patient satisfaction. Nevertheless, nowadays, outcomes are generally measured through hard endpoints, such as re-admissions and mortality indicators. Recently, the Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) have been included among the outcome measures within the Donabedian framework. How to move the concept of patient-centeredness to a macro level, including the patient point of view in care quality measurement, evaluation, and improvement? This paper integrates the Donabedian structure-process-outcome framework, by incorporating in the proper dimension the patient-indicators, namely the abovementioned PROMs and Patient-Reported Experience Measures (PREMs). While PROMs are clearly measures of outcome, PREMs can be collocated in the process dimension, since they can be useful for mapping processes and care pathways, in a lean perspective, as well as in the outcome dimension, because inherently linked to outcome, and enablers of patient-centeredness.

Can Patients Co-Create Value in an Online Healthcare Platform? An Examination of Value Co-Creation

With the development of online healthcare services, patients could receive support and create value with other users on online healthcare platforms. However, little research has been conducted on the internal mechanisms of patient value co-creation from the perspective of online healthcare platforms. To analyze patient value co-creation in online healthcare platforms, this study explores the underlying mechanisms of patient value co-creation among patients. The results show that value co-creation includes patient citizenship behavior and participation behavior. Information quality, peer communication, and system quality influence functional experiences and emotional experiences. In addition, functional experiences and emotional experiences could influence patient value co-creation. This study clarifies the mechanism of value co-creation among patients and provides insight into value co-creation in online healthcare platforms.