Ciiru Iraki's Profile

As medical advances continue to bring about improvement in longevity the proportion of elders not only in Rotterdam but around the globe continue to rise .According to United Nations there is continuing trend towards lower birth rate and death rate around the world. With increasing globalization therefore social needs such provision of medical care and psychological care to the elderly is becoming an international challenge, even in African where elderly are given high esteem and social status. This global challenge needs a global solutions which will be addresseed in our third and last module by Prof Rob, all the faculty and the interactions of all the students.

I agree with IPIE. A KPI should help us understand how well a company, hospital,business unit or individual is performing compared to their strategic goals and objectives. If the KPI is not well aligned with the corporate strategy and there is no communication and monitoring from the top leadership to the employees the practice might become obsolete. The KPI of the leader and those of the employees should address all the critical business questions and should be meaningful and informative. If this is lacking the board should seriously interrogate the current leadership in the company.

Patient experience encompasses the range of interactions that patients have with the health care system, including their care from health plans, and from doctors, nurses, and staff in hospitals, physician practices, and other health care facilities. As an integral component of health care quality, patient experience includes several aspects of health care delivery that patients value highly when they seek and receive care, such as getting timely appointments, easy access to information, and good communication with health care providers.

Past experience of patients and operational efficiency of hospital staff and doctors add value to healthcare services by ensuring that patient’s emotional and psychological support is taken care off, relieving fear and anxiety, patients are treated with respect, kindness, dignity, compassion and understanding. Effective treatment delivered by trusted professionals, participation of patient in decisions and respect and understanding for beliefs, values, concerns, preferences and their understanding of their condition give the best experience to patients. The challenges all the healthcare providers have is how to maintain the best patients experience consistently.

The world population is aging and becoming more affluent at rates that surpass the availability of quality healthcare resources. In addition, out-of-pocket medical costs of critical and elective procedures continue to rise, while nations offering universal care are faced with ever-increasing resource burdens. These drivers are forcing patients to pursue cross-border healthcare options either to save money or to avoid long waits for treatment. Medical tourism is both a friend and foe. A friend in that one can get the best healthcare overseas that is affordable. On the other hand most medical tourism continue to exploit the patients especially the cancer patients who travel in search of treatment when it is too late. The patient are treated but most of them die overseas before completing their treatment.
Medical tourism destination should go beyond advertising their hospitals and create strategic alliances with governments of countries where these patient comes from, This can be through building hospitals and training doctors and other health care workers, This will reduce diseases burden and save more life’s through proper and early diagnosis of chronic illness and cancers which are the major diseases that make people seek treatment overseas

In African tradition, talking openly about death and dying is not acceptable because it is considered disrespectful, bad luck, or causes loss of hope. The dying family members is protected from knowing their prognosis. Although the hospice and palliative care movements have been instrumental in increasing awareness in end-of-life issues, many people are still not familiar with these services. For some cultures, hospice and palliative cares focus on comfort, harmony, family and support fits nicely with the culture’s values and beliefs. For cultures where dying at home is a valued norm, those values are congruent with hospice care and any palliative program.

In our hospital set ups we are still struggling with making the palliative care programs more cultural orientated by involving the family members in decision making. We organize meeting between the families, palliative care providers and physicians. The palliative care team works in conjunction with the primary care physician and can offer assistance with end-of-life care. This includes the treatment of pain and other symptoms, emotional and spiritual support, assistance with communication of bad news, support for patients and families in medical decision-making. Despite all these efforts over 90% of the families want to take care of their dying families members at home as opposed to palliative care providers like hospice. We need more discussions and strategies to avert this trend.

Digital health-care revolution, will create winners and losers. This is because three groups are fighting a war for control of the health-care value chain. One group comprises, traditional innovator, pharmaceutical firms, hospitals and medical technology. The threat to the traditional innovators is that as medical records are digitized and new kinds of patient data arrive from difference sources and social media, insurers and governments can get much better insight into which treatments work.

For example an app or a wearable device that persuades people to walk a certain distance every day would be far cheaper for insurers and governments to provide than years of visits to doctors, hospitals and drugs. More data will not only identify those drugs that do not work, but will also give rise to new services that might involve taking no drugs at all and eliminate visits to the doctors.

The big question that all us should ask is who will be the big loser, the drug companies, the hospitals or the doctors? And what impact will this have to the role of doctors in the healthcare value chain?

This system is referred to as “consumer-driven healthcare” because claims are paid using a consumer-controlled account versus a fixed health insurance benefit. That gives patients greater control over their own health budgets and they are primary decision makers regarding the healthcare they receive. Consumer – driven healthcare shift the cost of healthcare to the back of patients especially people with chronic illness who spend heavily on daily medications. In our organization we have partnered with physicians, hospitals, nutritionists and pharmaceutical industries, this multidisciplinary approach of care has reduced the cost of hospitalization since the patient is engaged in his or her care.