The Doctor- Patient Relationship and the Outcomes Movement

By MICHEL ACCAD, MD
In a recent Harvard Business Review article, authors Erin Sullivan and Andy Ellner take a stand against the “outcomes theory of value,” advanced by such economists as Michael Porter and Robert Kaplan who believe that in order to “properly manage value, both outcomes and cost must be measured at the patient level.”
In contrast, Sullivan and Ellner point out that medical care is first of all a matter of relationships:
With over 50% of primary care providers believing that efforts to measure quality-related outcomes actually make quality worse, it seems there may be something missing from the equation. Relationships may be the key…Kurt Stange, an expert in family medicine and health systems, calls relationships “the antidote to an increasingly fragmented and depersonalized health care system.”
In their article, Sullivan and Ellner describe three success stories of practice models where an emphasis on relationships led to better care.
But in describing these successes, do the authors undermine their own argument?  For in order to identify the quality of the care provided, they point to improvements in patient satisfaction surveys in one case, decreased rates of readmission in another, and fewer ER visits and hospitalizations in the third.  In other words…outcomes! 

Perhaps sensing the difficulty of their position, Sullivan and Ellner conclude the article on a more sober note:
If we believe that relationships are key to value, how shoul...

Source: The Health Care Blog - November 4, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: THCB MICHEL ACCAD Source Type: blogs