How does the social network of healthcare providers affect patient health outcomes?
In September of 2000, the Millenium Development goals (MDGs) were developed in response to combat many global health issues such as, disease, hunger, failing education systems, discrimination, and environmental degradation. By 2015, world leaders decided to adopt a new list of goals called the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) due to the criticism that the MDGs were not measurable goals and therefore, would never get done. With these new goals in mind, healthcare providers had to adjust their ways to align with the new goals for a healthier future. The term for professional behavior changes among healthcare workers is “knowledge translation”. Researchers decided to study knowledge translation during the transition to the SDGs and its effects on health outcomes by using social network analysis among healthcare providers. This was to see if increased communication was the key to making better progress toward these goals.
https://systematicreviewsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13643-017-0597-1
In the study linked above, the researchers utilized a combination of whole networks and egocentric networks to attain a comprehensive look at communications between healthcare providers and whether these connections affected the health outcomes in patients. They gathered recent data, published no earlier than 2010, from tertiary health providers from the following sources:
- Co-authored journal publications
- Patient referrals between providers
- Attendance at conferences
- Contributions to online discussion forums
The study found that regions that were “denser and centralized” in the healthcare provider networks were associated with improved patient health outcomes. Centrality in social networks measures the influence that a node has on other nodes in the network. I assume that centralized regions of the network represented increased communication between executive health care providers. These types of leaders in the healthcare industry have more influence over other providers because of their effective methods and valuable research. I also imagine that the denser regions must be due to increased communications between providers of the same branch of healthcare. From this, I concluded that leaders among the healthcare industry are better at influencing effective communication within their departments and therefore, provide better care and health outcomes for their patients.
One thing that stood out in the research was that with increased betweenness centrality, adverse drug events increased. Betweenness centrality is defined as the number times a node lies on the shortest path to other nodes, meaning that there is most likely an authoritative figure that has control over the other nodes in its path. Because drugs are a sensitive area in public health policy, there are other factors that play into patients involved with drugs. There is most likely an increase of betweenness centrality in the network because there are authority figures in organizations, such as the DEA, that can have control over what information is communicated and shared with others. This, in effect, could alter the help that healthcare providers can give those patients because there is not complete transparency for them. Overall, it is clear that the outcomes of studying social networks in healthcare can help us influence and improve the system and potentially lead to the creation of an even more comprehensive set of development goals. However, because health factors can be so wide-ranging based on geographic region, demographics, etc., increased communication amongst healthcare providers may not improve outcomes for all areas of health, as it did not for drug related issues.