Benefits of howRwe

Benefits of howRwe include:

  1. Data Collection
    • Applicable to most patients and conditions
    • Use across different care settings (hospital, clinic, GP, home)
    • Consistently understood without training
    • Quick to complete in seconds
    • Simple aggregate scoring system
  2. Reporting and feedback
    • Standardised to enable comparisons
    • Easy to interpret results
    • Monitor changes over time and by location
    • Provide comparable information for management and commissioning
    • Improve communication between patients and the organisation
  3. Technology
    • Incorporate into routine health care processes
    • Multi-mode data collection (touch screen, web, paper or telephone)
    • Technology platform independence
    • Suitable for integration with clinical computer systems.

Patient experience is one aspect of understanding health outcomes, which is key for care providers to improve efficiency, effectiveness and productivity, and optimise patient value from the care provided. Hospitals, community, primary care and social care services can monitor howRwe data to help identify problems and drive up quality of service.

In routine use, howRwe ratings should be published immediately and shared withl staff, helping to ensure that the quality of patient experience is an ever present priority, and that everyone stays focused on helping the whole patient (patient-focused care).  howRwe provides a new communication channel for patients to convey their experience of the service provided, in a form that is structured, computable, easy to understand, standardised and suitable for showing trends. All staff should be empowered to act on this information immediately.

Patient-centric care may help overcome the vision of a hospital as a “soulless, anonymous, wasteful and inefficient medical factory, performing medicine as medicine demanded it, not as the patient needed it” (Roy Porter). howRwe data can be used to detect unexpected changes (good or bad) in patients experience in a particular unit.  Timely detection of deterioration can prompt remedial action to rectify the situation before it escalates.  High quality can be recognised and rewarded.

howRwe provides part of a continuous feedback loop to help managers monitor progress in the units for which they are responsible.  This same information can be used to align the incentives that drive each stakeholder – patients, clinicians, managers and commissioners.

howRwe data can provide a language for patient-centred care, which patients and their families can use to express how they feel and articulate their concerns in ways that they can relate to.  Routinely collected, this information may help managers to deal with patient complaints and defend against unwarranted medico-legal cases.

howRwe data can support negotiations with commissioners based on results achieved and case severity, inform strategic choices, and provide evidence for defending medico-legal actions. Ultimately it is the patient’s own perception that matters most. Commissioners need comparable patient experience data from all healthcare providers to make informed decisions concerning resource allocation and value for money, based on results delivered, not just costs.