Sunday, August 2, 2015

Hospital feedback system


A couple of years back, I took my mother to a hospital in an emergency because she was suffering from sudden dip inblood pressure. They did a heart check and persisted on us that she should be admitted to an ICU to monitor during the night. When I returned in the morning, I couldn’t find the blood pressure reading on the monitor. When I asked, they realized that they had missed to connect the BP probe! This is just one instance of negligence, bad management and willful mistreatment that I and many others face every day in hospitals in India.

The strange thing is that there are no checks and balances on hospitals. They are completely unregulated, at least in practice and seem to have little incentive to improve given the burgeoning demand unmet by supply. No one has the time or money to avail the legal option. I strongly advocate that hospitals should make monthly data public on number of things including diagnostic tests conducted per patient, % negative, success rate, death rate, etc. However, everything will not be captured in outcome data. There is also an urgent need of a public feedback system where patients can put their objective experiences. One should build a nice digital product like a ratemyprofessors.com, which will hopefully create a disincentive to screw it up! Hospitals will be free to give their version and a rebuttal on the platform. Very very needed!


Pros: Adherence to transparency; Better health care; Patient Rights
Cons: Baseless non-objective complaints
To reflect: Legality and how to save the platform from a legal defamation tamasha

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