3PHealth Blog
50 Shades of Engagement
Monday, February 8th, 2016
I recently met a gentlemen who is offering an amazing new travel service that focuses on supporting good health habits when we travel for business or leisure. His service really struck a cord with me and is one I hope to try out on my next trip. Reading his most recent blog on corporate wellness, it really got me thinking…
When it comes to patient engagement, studies repeatedly show that it improves health outcomes and can meaningfully reduce costs. But talk to 50 different people and you are likely to find that they all describe patient engagement differently. Why? Because patient engagement is not just a “point solution”, or digital health device, app or service, texting, emailing, or even doctor-patient bedside chats. It includes all of these things – and more.
Patient engagement must be sustained over a lifetime, and in reality, we are only patients for a small part of our lives. The rest of the time we are spouses and parents; employees and employers; athletes, travelers, musicians and volunteers. For most of us, being a “patient” is simply a temporary role we play within our greater lives’ journeys. As providers, technologists, business people and patients, we will do well to remember this as we formulate engagement strategies and tools.
As we all prepare our digital health and patient engagement strategies, it’s important to be inclusive. Why not include healthy travel advice, or local gym hours, or links to patient support groups outside of your campus walls? Be it sickness or wellness, navigation, information access or data privacy and sharing preferences, to be sustainable, patient engagement must go beyond medication and appointment reminders. Engage your patients as people – on their terms and in there way. It’s really not as hard as it may seem.
Health IT Must Adapt to its Users
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2016
Change is hard – but we often make it harder than it has to be. The healthcare industry is in the middle of tremendous change: regulatory change, biotech advances, technology refresh, and changing customer expectations about convenience and access. And through all this change, new competitors to traditional care delivery models are springing up every day – like the corner clinic, telemedicine and remote monitoring. It can be overwhelming and providers are pushing back.
Next to reimbursement consistency, providers are the 2nd biggest barrier to telemedicine adoption. Healthcare providers like their mobile devices and convenience tools just like the rest of us. But unfortunately, much of health IT has been focused on EHRs, patient portals, individual condition support and consumer app functionality – and the greater context of care delivery within an integrated plan has suffered. A point-solution approach, without an integrated digital health strategy can disrupt workflows and make health system navigation difficult and confusing.
While the need for change is clear, as digital health strategists, our focus should be on simplifying and integrating the care delivery process – for all healthcare constituents. While we can’t remove all the backend complexity of digital care delivery, we can mask that complexity for our users. New health technologies should adapt to the users (both patients and providers), not force the users to adapt to technology. The transition to digital health is happening, so let’s all work to make the adoption process easier for our users – both patients and providers.
Digital Health Innovation to Sustain Care Plan Adherence
Monday, February 1st, 2016
The Healthcare Intelligence Network released the findings of it’s recent HINtelligence Report and it included some pretty staggering statistics:
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Using care plans increased medication adherence and self-management in patients and boosted clinical quality ratings for 70 percent of healthcare organizations engaged in the tools
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A majority of respondents—83 percent—incorporate care plans into value-based healthcare delivery processes, according to HIN’s December 2015 survey, with more than half of remaining organizations planning to do so in the coming year
The primary tool used by survey respondents (nearly 2/3) was the electronic health record, with paper records sited by almost of half of those surveyed.
Now this got me thinking… Is this sustainable? What about outside of value-based delivery models and what would the numbers be if the patients actually had a personalized engagement and communications interface into their care plan? What if real-time analytics, reminders or alerts could be incorporated? How about remote monitoring devices or the ability to share care plans with a personal care circle? The health outcomes and cost savings could be astronomical!
One such group working hard to make these kinds of advances a day-to-day reality is Prime Health CO – a Colorado-based non-profit dedicated to digital health innovation and efficacy within the country’s largest health systems. Kudos to Prime Health and it’s member companies who are doing the good work to transform healthcare delivery and make this world a healthier place to live.
Effective Communication Can Save Healthcare
Wednesday, January 27th, 2016
This past week the Clinton Foundation held its Health Matters Activation Summit. Key to the discussion was the importance of communication and community.
Mobihealth News also reported on the Summit talking about the communications theme and the need for simple solutions to improve communications (versus digital health technology for technology’s sake) and it’s importance to improving health outcomes.
Healthcare has been reactive, rather than proactive. Prescriptive rather than descriptive or advisory. Incentivized vs. penalized. No wonder engagement has been low.
Nobody wants to be “engaged” by being told what to do or what they cannot do. Health consumers want guidance, not dogma. Even if the health information is identical, how it is presented/accessed can make a world of difference in engaging and motivating health system customers. When Americans feel like they have a choice and decision in the the outcome of things, we are more likely to engage than when they don’t. Healthcare is no different.
“There are simple technologies that would go a long way toward improving quality of life,” said Warne. “For example, if someone is eligible for Medicaid they’re probably eligible for certain social programs, or housing programs, or other assistance programs.
The above quote from the MobihealthNews article is just one example of the benefits that a Choice® enabled digital health delivery strategy can provide. We make it easy for people to find the appropriate information, services (navigation), and communications tools whether related to care or benefits/coverage, all through a single interface – even if the information is housed on the servers of unrelated organizations. This simple approach to personalized communication can have a profound impact on improved activation, outcomes and cost savings.
Epistrophic Care and the End of Office Visits
Monday, October 19th, 2015
This year’s Patient Engagement Summit covered much more thoughtful issues than last year’s initial event. Kudos to the organizers, HIMSS and Healthcare IT News. This particular quote from Daniel Sands, MD, an instructor at the Harvard School of Medicine and co-founder and co-chair of the Society for Participatory Medicine, really caught my eye:
“Healthcare is a collaboration,” he pointed out. And while patients are demanding that collaboration – through the sharing of data, mutual respect, shared decision-making, communication and engagement – providers are still struggling to see beyond the delivery of epic catastrophic (“epistrophic”) care.
“We’re moving from healthcare to health, and we’re moving from the office to the home and, actually, anywhere,” he said.
In other words, forget about the office visit and look at all the spaces in between – what he called the “frequent life touches.” And that requires figuring out a new way to go from delivering volume to delivering value.
And this also means figuring out a way to to interact with the patient anytime and anywhere. Mobile technologies offer the best solution for this type of engagement. Whether it is a phone call, text message, email, data upload, or looking at some meaningful health-related information – it can all be accomplished with a single, well-thought out patient engagement strategy that incorporates the use of mobile tools to make any kind of communication personal and meaningful. After all, the ability to effectively communicate is the key to engaging each other. What other technology besides today’s smartphones, offers us so many ways to communicate in one convenient “package?” And all at the point of need and convenience.
In this same article, Alicia Staley, chief patient officer at Akari Health, mentions that, “The business model doesn’t exist for patient engagement,”. I’d beg to differ. It does exist. It is just new healthcare. To learn more, give us a shout.