This week Dr. Jay is traveling again, bringing you the Tuesday Two Minute Drill from Detroit, Michigan. In today’s TMD he is completing the circle on the discussion of self-discharges.
Patient goals
Today we are completing the circle on the discussion of self-discharges. We talked about the importance of tracking the ratio of self to doctor discharges. Then we talked about the importance of tracking the reasons why your patients self discharge from care. Now Dr. Jay is talking about how to move the needle to reduce the number of self discharges in your practice.
There are three steps to reduce the number of self discharges in your practice:
Make sure that somewhere on your intake paperwork or patient portal you have a spot for your patients to report what their goals of care are.
When you do your report of findings discuss their specific goals with them and make sure you share the vision-making with them. Also, at this time make sure you employ shared decision-making. This means when you tell them this is the treatment plan, this is the treatment we are going to employ, this is the frequency and duration of your care based on the evidence and my clinical experience, make sure they say yes I understand, yes I agree, yes this is going to help me achieve my goals.
When patients are coming in for regular visits and re-exam make sure you discuss what they believe their progress is toward their goals are. It’s not enough to just ask what is your pain level from 0-10. That’s not enough. You want to make sure you are also tracking their perceived progress toward their goal. So if they want to run a marathon, are they able to run a certain distance now that you’ve delivered a certain amount of care.
Tracking those goals that are important to your patient is critically important to reducing self-discharges. Employ these tactics to make sure your patients complete their care and get the best possible long-term outcome.
Head over to our Facebook page and let us know if you track this information already or how you are going to start tracking your patient’s goals.
Your questions and feedback are always welcome and appreciated! Connect with us on Instagram or email us at [email protected]
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 WHYpatients 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! Connect with us on Instagram or email us at [email protected]
