Dashboard Topic: Patient Feedback Dashboard Allows Doctors to Measure Communication Skills.

Today’s physicians and health care facilities make use of the latest advances in technology to aid in their diagnoses, manage their practices and even assist in surgery. Have you noticed, however, that there has been a decline in the quality of a doctor’s bedside manner? Or at least there seems to be from the way everyone seems to complain about it.

Whatever happened to the kindness and compassion that was the hallmark of a doctor? Whether it’s the fault of the training process or the growing aggravations of managing a medical practice, it seems that with the rise of technology in the medical office, we have seen a fall in patient satisfaction.

I’m happy to report that one particular technology – that which we study everyday here on “Dashboards By Example” – namely, the business intelligence dashboard is now being used by physicians to monitor patient feedback. The Department of Family Medicine in the Medical College of Georgia School of Medicine (MCG) is running a pilot program that lets doctors collect feedback and view the results of patient satisfaction surveys on a performance dashboard.

Finally! Now the patient can do something about the decline in bedside manner. Haven’t you ever wanted to leave feedback about a doctor’s bedside manner but didn’t do it because you couldn’t remain anonymous? Most of us in that situation simply found another doctor. We were unhappy but never provided feedback about our experience. That changes now with the system in place at MCG.

I’ll explain the details, but let’s first examine the dashboard itself. Here is the doctor’s view:

Click to see the rest of this post. We’ll discuss the patient view of the dashboard and how the survey questions are administered.

The medical college is using the term “Glanceable” to describe the nature of their clinical dashboard. While we haven’t really seen the use of the term “Glanceable Dashboard” to describe business intelligence dashboard views, it does have a certain ring to it, so maybe it will catch on.

As described by the dashboard team at MCG:

Glanceable dashboard takes a measure of physician communication

Much like a dashboard gives a good read on how your car is doing, researchers hope they’ll soon give physicians a better idea of how they are doing with patients.

Glanceable data is available for stock market reports, the weather and a growing array of data consumers want in rapid, succinct fashion. “We are moving fast and we want data fed to us in a way we can process without thinking about it,” says Dr. Peggy Wagner, research director for the Department of Family Medicine in the Medical College of Georgia School of Medicine. But it made her think: Why not have a globe on every doctor’s desk that says how they are doing from the patient’s perspective?

It’s not quite a globe, but MCG researchers have developed a touch screen kiosk that lets patients quickly answer questions about their physician encounter. Their input instantly becomes a colorful measure displayed on a 24-inch monitor at the back of the clinic: red abstract orbs for below average, yellow for average and green for above-average. “This changes real time as patients put in more data,” says Dr. Wagner.

To help protect patient anonymity, the glanceable dashboard only updates with every fifth patient. Patient feedback about an individual physician is included in private e-mails to that physician at the end of each week.

Here is a screenshot of what the patient sees on the kiosk:

The kiosks are collecting data for eight weeks in primary care practice sites in Tifton, Jesup, Blackshear and Moultrie, Georgia. Only two sites have the glanceable dashboard. “Our assumption is physicians will change their behavior to get more green lights,” says Dr. Wagner, and having the dashboards in only two locations will help her determine if that is true.

Patients are asked six communication-related questions such as

• Did the doctor you saw today explain things in a way that was easy to understand?
• Did the doctor listen carefully to you? Did the doctor you saw today show respect for what you had to say?

Questions were drawn from the 2007 Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Provider and Services’ Clinician and Group Survey developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which is funding the study.

“We want to help health care providers maximize the relatively short time they have with patients but there has to be a way to measure that first,” says Dr. Wagner. This feasibility study will look at whether patients will take a survey while the visit is fresh on their minds – many mailed surveys end up in a recycling bin – and how physicians respond.

Study sites, which include practices with two to seven physicians, will be able to keep the systems after the study is complete to gather pretty much any type of useful data such as whether patients were offered flu shots or whether a subpopulation, such as diabetics, are getting the extra care needed. “You could use the dashboard idea to ask questions about anything. It has a lot of application for the future,” Dr. Wagner says. Hardware and software, developed for the project at MCG, is exceedingly adaptable, usable on a laptop or even a palmtop computer, says Stan Sulkowski, educational program specialist in the Department of Family Medicine.

Here is a picture of the happy dashboard team at MCG: