Transparency is a Crucial Element in Ensuring Healthcare Improvement

The Indian Healthcare sector has emerged as one of the rapidly booming sectors, in terms of both employment and revenue. Fuelled by numerous external and internal factors, the sector is growing at a brisk pace, expecting to record a CAGR of 16.5 percent and a total industry size of $280 billion by 2020. This intense breakneck growth of the Indian healthcare sector calls for a substantial need and demand for quality healthcare, where affordability and patient experience are of utmost importance. In that sense, to build an efficient and effective healthcare system and to ensure healthcare improvement in all aspects, transparency is an important element.

With time, consumers of healthcare services are becoming more and more involved and conscious towards their health upkeep and are taking more responsibility to pay for it. As a result, there exists a major push to bring transparency in healthcare pricing, information, and quality within the care continuum. While transparency has been practiced in various other sectors, healthcare has finally joined the bandwagon. However, the Indian healthcare industry remains mostly opaque due to the increasing high-deductible health facilities and skyrocketing medical expenses. This lack of transparency in the Indian healthcare system could possibly threaten to wear away the public trust across the entire healthcare spectrum. The more comprehensive and accurate the health information, the better will the healthcare work. This is what healthcare transparency strives to achieve.

What does Transparency indicate in the Healthcare Spectrum?

Transparency can be defined as the availability and accessibility of full medical information required for collaboration, cooperation, and collective decision making among healthcare professionals and patients without any hidden agendas and conditions. Greater transparency in healthcare would lead to openness and willingness in sharing medical information based on which most of the healthcare decisions are made. Having a transparent interaction with patients, clinicians, and payers can significantly contribute to the healthcare improvement in terms of quality and cost control.

The concept of transparency in healthcare has gained a lot of prominence over the past years. Many healthcare organizations are working to increase pricing transparency in healthcare services and patient care to achieve success. Indeed, the need for transparency and better data management within the healthcare system is essential to deal with the existing healthcare crisis, particularly in achieving better healthcare quality outcomes, reducing health care costs, and improving the overall efficiency within the healthcare system.

Transparency is vital not only to improve quality and cost but also to foster a more competitive healthcare marketplace by opening up opportunities of transparency within the opaque health system. Transparency means everything from how information is shared with the patients, how physicians are practicing medicine, to how hospitals and other healthcare providers gathering and reporting health outcomes. Having a transparent health system would benefit physicians and patients alike by providing better clarity of the treatment and promoting trust among the consumers leading to long-term improvements in health outcomes.

Transparency Improves Decision-Making

There is a growing trend in healthcare towards providing the patients with access to their health records, which includes diagnostic results, past treatments, and other information through patient portals. Generally, patients desire to seek out medical information on their health conditions through multiple sources and gain access to test results, provider notes, and hospital records. All of this information allows patients to stay better informed of their health condition and strengthen their healthcare decision making. A well-informed patient with access to information is more likely to ask focused questions to their healthcare provider making their visit more productive.

When it comes to complex patient care decisions, and in situations where multiple treatment options exist, transparency in healthcare would help physicians and patients analyze the associated risks and benefits, gain valuable insight of the condition, and come up with well-informed decisions. Moreover, shared decision-making tools with transparency allow patients to have a comprehensive review of the pros and cons of the treatment options and make decisions, taking into account their individual values and preferences. In short, transparent access to information can greatly increase the confidence and trust of patients in their physicians, thereby aiding in making complex health-related decisions simpler and choosing the best possible treatment options, independent of the subsequent outcomes.

With the concerns about the quality and cost of healthcare continuing to grow, the need for transparency as a vital element has been widely recognized by the healthcare sector. As a result, healthcare providers are seeking ways to make health information accessible to consumers and bring about transparency in the relative costs and quality of care throughout the healthcare continuum.

Healthcare systems today are embracing transparency into their realm so as to enhance their patient experiences and improve their overall healthcare outcomes and care delivery. When healthcare providers bring greater transparency in performance and patient satisfaction, it can ensure healthcare improvement at the hospital level and enable providers to benchmark their performance against the competition. Transparency in healthcare promotes better quality and consistency of health care and delivery at multiple levels within the healthcare continuum. It can also greatly improve the patient-physician relationship and establish trust, which can ultimately promote better outcomes, higher levels of satisfaction, and bring improvement to the entire healthcare domain.