Healthcare Prices

From Modern Healthcare:

Prices for hospital services rose 0.3% for the second straight month in July, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ seasonally adjusted Consumer Price Index. That’s compared with July 2007, when prices climbed 0.9%. For the year that ended in July, hospital prices rose 7.2%, compared with 6.4% for the year-ago period.

Physician prices climbed 0.1% last month compared with 0.3% in June. In July 2007, the index of physician prices rose 0.4%. For the 12 months that ended in July, physician prices rose 2.4%, compared with 4% in the year-ago period.

Does a waiting room video about what to expect in the ED affect patient satisfaction?

From the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine:

Objective: We created an instructional waiting room video that explained what patients should expect during their emergency department (ED) visit and sought to determine whether preparing patients using this video would 1) improve satisfaction, 2) decrease perceived waiting room times and 3) increase calls to an outpatient referral line in an ambulatory population.

Methods: This serial cross-sectional study took place over a period of 2 months before (control) and 2 months after the introduction of an educational waiting room video that described a typical patient visit to our ED. We enrolled a convenience sample of adult patients or parents of pediatric patients who were triaged to the ED waiting room; a research assistant distributed and collected the surveys as patients were being discharged after treatment. Subjects were excluded if they were admitted. The primary outcome was overall satisfaction measured on a 5-point Likert scale, and secondary outcomes included perceived waiting room time, and the number of outpatient referral-line calls.

Conclusion: Preparing patients for their ED experience by describing the ED process of care through a waiting room video can improve ED patient satisfaction and the knowledge of outpatient clinic resources in an ambulatory population. Future studies should research the implementation of this educational intervention in a randomized fashion.