 "Photo: Caleb Miller")
Little more than half of hospital patients in the U.S. receive the recommended level of care, and something must be done to change that, the chief medical officer of St. David's Hospital in Austin said Wednesday.
The School of Nursing hosted guest lecturer Dr. Steven Berkowitz at the Etter-Harbin Alumni Center as the first part of a series analyzing the critical issues effecting health care today. An audience of mostly nursing students and faculty listened to his presentation, which focused on the "conundrum" of the quality of health care that patients expect and how the industry comes up short.
Berkowitz pointed out that only 54.9 percent of patients get recommended health care, according to a 2006 report in The New England Journal of Medicine. But the former psychiatrist also offered a three-part solution: data transparency to improve clinical performance, evidence-based medicine that proves the superiority of one method and the ensuing rewards for health care quality and patient satisfaction.
"Perhaps the single greatest challenge in clinical medicine is reducing the 'deadly' delay - the amount of time it takes for findings from clinical trials to become clinical practice," Berkowitz said. "According to [a 2000 study in the "Yearbook of Medical Informatics"] it takes an average of 17 years for a clinical procedure like the flu vaccine to be used. I'm not saying we want this number down to zero, but somewhere between zero and 17 is a needed improvement."
Berkowitz also said that, beginning in October 2008, patients will not be "additionally reimbursed" for hospital-acquired conditions like air embolism and catheter-associated urinary tract infection.
"In addition to the reimbursement rate, the bottom line is that patients will pay more for better performance and therefore create more business volume," he said. "We are blessed to be in a great profession and I think this quote puts it best: 'To the world, you may be just one person, but to one person, you may just be the world."
At the end of the event, nursing junior Tara Thornhill said Berkowitz's presentation instilled one lasting point.
"I think the lecture helped make clear that our industry should be patient-focused," she said. "From my experience, nurses have too much to do and not the time they want to spend with patients. There are so many things we can stop from happening and things we can catch if only we had this."
Janis Carelock, a clinical instructor at the school, said the lecture "reinforced that consistency in practice and the use of evidence in standards are needed to guide us."
"It's about implementing quality care at a cost that is affordable," she said. "All of his solutions must be implemented, but it's just how are we going to do it. It will be interesting to see how the individual hospitals and organizations will tackle these problems."
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