Is Transparency In Healthcare Good For Patient Care?

NHS Patients undergoing heart surgery will now be able to access information about their doctor’s performance online. They will also be able to view data regarding success and failure rates of the hospital – a move that could put pressure on the c-suite to perform.

Transparency in the healthcare industry is big news at the moment, but is it really beneficial to the running of hospital c-suites?  

The latest online tool has been developed by the University of Manchester and is called Blue Book Online. The aim of the tool is to give patients informed choices about their healthcare. The tool can also be utilised to the advantage of c-suite executives, who can promote their institution online. It will also provide industry standard benchmarks, which could see healthcare across the board improve.

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Pre-operative patients will have access to their doctor’s performance data online, for example they can see how many times they have performed the operation and how well each procedure went, according to the Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery.

In addition, the Blue Book Online will provide patients with details about their surgery, including expected outcomes, risk factors and long-term outcomes.

James Roxburgh, President of the Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery, said, “It seems likely that the only effective way of preventing further gross failures of clinical governance is to have more widespread and transparent use of clinical outcomes data.

“The Blue Book Online and other associated IT tools will empower patients and lead to better decision making by professionals and a more positive patient experience.”

The Society also announced plans to launch an app in the near future. This will allow surgeons on-the-go access to outcomes data and will assist them in making rapid accurate and effective decisions about a patient’s care.

The healthcare industry is becoming more transparent every day. Do you think this is a good thing for healthcare executives? Does it encourage best practice or mean that visible outcomes are focused on rather that the most pressing concerns?

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