Two Minute Drill: It’s about the patient
Dr. Jay in Ortigia, Italy for this week’s Tuesday Two Minute Drill. He is continuing the conversation on metrics that matter. This week he is adding one more thing you should be tracking on your weekly spreadsheet.
Metrics that matter
This week Dr. Jay is continuing the conversation around metrics that matter. Last week he talked about the importance of tracking self vs doctor discharge patients.
Self-discharges are critically important to track for a variety of reasons. There is certainly a business use case, but it is really about the patients at the end of the day. It’s about making sure we can reduce this self-discharge number as much as possible because we know one of the most common reasons patients discharge is because they feel better.
We also know from the scientific literature that the most accurate predictor of any future injury is a past injury. Many times this is because patients stop treating a problem when the symptoms go away.
Having a baseline number to know where you stand with the patients that are not completing their care is an important first step. We talked last week about running a report and tracking these numbers at the end of the week in an excel spreadsheet but the next thing we want you to do is to start adding in the reasons WHY patients are self-discharging.
We know from our own data it could be a wide variety of reasons:
- They feel better
- They don’t feel better/you didn’t get a good clinical outcome with them
- Insurance reasons
These are common reasons why patients may self-discharge but you have got to track this information to know about your own patients. So, don’t just create the spreadsheet that identifies if they are doctor or self-discharge but make sure you design the spreadsheet so you know exactly the reasons why.
At the next Two Minute Drill, Dr. Jay is going to talk about what to do for these different categories of reasons of self-discharge so you can attack the issues, get a better result, and get a better clinical outcome for these patients that are self-discharging too soon.
Head over to our Facebook page and let us know if you started tracking your self discharges after last week’s TMD.
Your questions and feedback are always welcome and appreciated!
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