Everyone loves to be on an award list. I get all kinds of pitches about how a doctor has been named outstanding businessperson of the year or how a hospital was named the 5th best place to work on the entire East Coast. I almost always delete those emails because I don’t give much weight to these lists. Sometimes you can nominate yourself or else the competition is so weak that it would be embarrassing if you weren’t in the top 10.
In his 2024 view of the healthcare world, Dr. Stephen Klasko created several new awards to recognize good work by hospitals and caregivers. In his futuristic fantasy, he was receiving one of these new US News & World Reports awards. He shared the scoring criteria for other awards for medical schools and hospitals. If Forbes or FierceHealthcare or Becker’s Hospital Review ever launched any one of these competitions, I would put the winners on the front page of MedCity News.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
Take a look at his reality-based competitions and see what you think.
Believable Understandable Bill
As you might guess, this one is my favorite. In Klasko’s view of the healthcare world of 2024, hospitals get ranked on the BUB quotient.
“It shows you have enough respect for your patients to not send them something that they can’t read,” Klasko said.
This award is another much needed reality check.
“This award shows that we can meet our own marketing promises,” he said. “Literally we have to deliver what we say.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
This one is Klasko’s favorite.
“Every one of our patients gets Google glasses so we can actually look at what the patients are seeing when they’re getting rounded on, and then we have other hospital admins look at those recordings and rate whether they would like to be at that hospital,” he said.
Talk about peer review! Documenting on video what happens at a hospital – the good and the bad – would do a lot for improving safety and best practices. That change would be even harder than getting badge cameras on police officers around the nation but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen.
Collecting the data needed to present these awards would certainly be an eye-opening experience for doctors and nurses, a much-needed reality check for many of them.
