It is for this reason that the measurement of patient experience has been a major component of health system quality. The effective delivery of care to an individual is a complex partnership between care delivery teams and the patient. Central to success is the commitment of the patient, and central to that commitment is their experience.
Experience is a complex concept, being governed not only by the interaction of the individual with their environment (people, place and processes), but also by how they interpret those interactions, which involves their pre and post event experiences and their interpretation of those interactions. Because of this, much of the work in this area has been focused on establishing a comprehensive array of secondary measures of experience involving quantitative measures of healthcare service interactions (e.g., time, place, and completeness) and qualitative survey measures of the patient’s response to those interactions.
While effective in maintaining and improving existing experience generating processes, this survey approach to experience is not particularly effective in innovating the delivery of new patient experience types. Consequently, it is not very well suited to leveraging the many billions of dollars that have been spent in digitising our healthcare system to catalyse the new more effective physical, virtual, and hybrid technology mediated patient experiences needed to transform both the effectiveness and efficiency of care delivery.
Addressing this important opportunity has been the focus of a joint RMIT University (CoBL/Health Transformation Lab)/Flinders University team which has recently published a paper on the role of information technology in driving patient experience (click here to download the paper: A Sense of Coherence Approach to Improving Patient Experience Using Information Infrastructure Modeling: Design Science Research ). At the core of this work is a technology mediated experience framework built around an environmental stressor approach to patient experience.
This framework utilises the well-established Sense of Coherence approach, where a patient’s experience is largely described in terms of the individual’s interactions with their environment (people place and process) in which these interactions can be described in terms of the Sense of Coherence domains of manageability, comprehensibility and meaningfulness. This provides a new way of describing an existing or desired healthcare environment in terms of sets of people, place and process interactions that contribute to an individual’s needs in terms of manageability, comprehensibility and meaningfulness. This breaks the healthcare experience into a landscape where information technology can be explicitly designed for its experience impact.
This approach allows the important balance between a patient’s perceived need and the requirement to deliver effective care to be established. A patient may not want to go through rehabilitation, but it is central to their wellbeing. The Sense of Coherence approach enables this balance to be established through the careful crafting of the patient supported experience statements which describe each of the Sense of Coherence domains.
To fully utilise the opportunity that information technology presents to care delivery requires organisations to innovate well beyond the the physical facility design and pure virtual clinical information technology environments. Healthcare also needs to accelerate their design of innovative hybrid physical and virtual care provider environments, leveraging the strengths of the physical care facilities with virtual care technologies to deliver new levels of care where it is most required, encompassing home, work, or dedicated care facilities. It is intended that this technology to experience framework will provide a bridge where the imagination of both clinical care designers and information technologists can coalesce to envision new ways of delivering physical, virtual and hybrid models of care, explicitly designed around the patient experience.
Australia has only just begun to tap the potential we are designing into our existing and future digital health systems. While our health system is still recovering from the pandemic onslaught it must prepare for a rapidly ageing population, an increasing prevalence of chronic disease, and an explosion of care options, all adding cost and complexity to our care system. We have the opportunity to better leverage our existing healthcare assets and guide our future investments to meet this challenge through using information technology mediated patient experience to catalyse our innovation in care system design.
