Patient education and outcome of care

Dr Purushottam Kumar Garg

It has been said that low health literacy in patients has been linked to higher mortality. Illiterate persons do not have to die early if they are in an appropriate system. Imagine a machine and a product. If there is a defective machine or no machine, the products will have lots of waste, but if the system is well and foolproof[reliable], the product ( outcome will all, almost all ) be the same. Illiteracy has been linked to a higher hospital stay. Hospital stay is in the hand of literate doctors, hospital staff, case managers, and insurance payers. The patient, literate, or illiterate has hardly much say about it. Illiterate people are blamed for more ER visits. It is other things, socio-economic factors, and access to a provider in that group, besides illiteracy which makes them go to ER.

So the point is often made that increases their medical knowledge. Then they will have a better outcome. And how you are going to first increase their knowledge base? Firstly they are not literate in anything? No. They do not want to know. Everybody does not want to know it. They all be doctors, nurses, or medical technology or something in the medical courier.

Medical knowledge is vast and increasing almost hourly as the applied science behind it is growing exponentially. What and how much a doctor knows in medicine, which is a profession is undermined.

Spending money dedicated purely to patient care mostly wasteful at present. 90% of people at present do not access their medical records when inspired, helped, educated to do it through their EMR, on which the government spends God knows how many dollars. Every doctor min USA was given $15,000 for 3 years to have the necessary hardware and software to do just that and more.

Our team in SSS suggests that we can solve this long-standing and big problem in very little time and with much less money with immediate results almost as desired from day one. And in the process patients will get the necessary skill and education relevant to her and him. Just an ideal solution. Let us explain to you by one example.

Hypertension is one of the most common chronic diseases worldwide or worlds wise. As there are no symptoms, it is not diagnosed at the right time unless we measure blood pressure. Almost 30% will have it, hardly any day in my ER duty goes by when I do not see a patient who came in ER because of high blood pressure. It causes expensive and multiple complications including heart diseases, kidney failure, strokes and so many more, all of them cost a lot to the society and their families. This is happening right now with all our plans in place. Besides doctors and nurses, a team of educated workers is put to talk by various medical insurers with enormous financial costs.

We suggest that the government make it mandatory to identify patients with hypertension in a country and then give each a blood pressure machine which besides keeping record in the memory sends readings to the cloud, monitored by government bodies.

Patients are made compliant by laws like hold their benefit in some way if they do not take blood pressure as per protocol. Eg holds money from Social Security check, hold tax benefit and in many other ways.

Machines are not free for anybody. Its cost and its operating expenses are added to a person's “national debt account”. Deductions can be made from people's money monitored by a high power committee.

The recovered money is recycled in the healthcare system. If somebody dies without paying to “NDA”, debt is added to his or her beneficiary.

Reading from the BP machine is retrieved and monitored by computers, like 100 of thousands of reading can be processed per hour.