Becker's Hospital Review

22 PATIENT EXPERIENCE Viewpoint: Time to rethink mandatory patient hospital gowns By Anuja Vaidya W hile patient hospital gowns serve a number of practical purposes, the psychological effects of don- ning them may be more harmful than good, a physician argued in an opinion piece in e New York Times. Ersilia M. DeFilippis, MD, a fellow in cardio- vascular medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia University Irving Med- ical Center, wrote that when patients put on hospital gowns "they are exposed, vulnerable and deidentified, contrary to the authority and protection conferred by the white coat [worn by physicians]." e hospital gown is designed to allow easy access to intravenous lines through which drugs are delivered to the body, and they allow clinicians to more easily conduct phys- ical exams. e gowns are also unisex and one-size-fits-all. But they leave too many body parts unnec- essarily exposed, Dr. Defilippis said. She pointed to a 2014 study in JAMA Internal Medicine conducted in Canada, which found that very few patients wear anything more than underwear under their gowns. Yet half of those patients could have worn more without any disruption to the care they were receiving, physicians admitted. Some healthcare institutions, such as Cleve- land Clinic, have recognized the need to change the hospital gown. e clinic hired Diane von Furstenberg to design a more chic gown without the open back. Dr. DeFilippis said she supports getting rid of the gowns in situations where the patient's care does not require it. She suggested allowing patients and families to bring in the patient's own clothes, a practice that isn't a huge departure from patients being allowed to bring in pictures or other mementos. e simple act of wearing one's own clothes while in the hospital may help lessen anxiety and increase self-esteem among patients, she said. "It's as if the concept of the hospital gown is so irrevocably tied to what it means to be a patient that we haven't considered the patient experience without it," she wrote. n Americans would embrace AI and 24/7 monitoring to cut healthcare costs, survey finds By Andrea Park D espite their current reluctance to wholeheartedly wel- come digital health tools such as remote monitoring devices and artificial intelligence algorithms into their lives, many Americans would do so if it meant lower health- care costs, according to a survey released Feb. 19. In the Future of Health Care Study, researchers from Los Ange- les-based USC Annenberg School for Communication and Jour- nalism surveyed 1,000 respondents, representing every state. Key findings include: 1. Almost 25 percent of respondents said they would allow artificial intelligence-based technology to be applied to their medical treatment if it resulted in reduced medical costs or health insurance rates. 2. Even more of those surveyed were willing to accept increas- ingly invasive tradeoffs for lower prices: One-third said they would agree to round-the-clock personal monitoring by their insurance companies or healthcare professionals if it lowered their insurance rates. 3. While respondents expressed overall satisfaction with their current health insurers, 30 percent said they were open to purchasing less-expensive coverage from disruptors outside the healthcare industry, namely tech and retail giants such as Amazon, Google and Costco. n ER physicians' race, gender doesn't affect patient satisfaction, study suggests By Mackenzie Bean A physician's gender or race may not influence patient satisfaction ratings in the emergen- cy room, according to a study published in JAMA Network Open. For the study, researchers recruited a geographically diverse sample of 3,592 Americans to participate in an online ER visit simulation between March 9 and July 25, 2018. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four physicians: 823 had a black woman; 791 had a black man; 828 had a white woman; and 835 had a white man. Researchers introduced doubt about the physicians' diagnosis by presenting con- flicting results from an online symptom checker. At the end of the simulation, researchers surveyed participants about their confidence in the physi- cian and their satisfaction with his or her diagnosis and treatment plans. They identified no significant differences in patients' evaluations of female or black physicians, suggesting that bias for white male physi- cians does not influence satisfaction ratings in the ER. "This is not to say that people are bias-free, but it did not appear to enter into their ratings of care in sur- veys," lead author Rachel Solnick, MD, a researcher and emergency medicine physician at Ann Arbor-based Michigan Medicine, said in a news release. n

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