Patient Engagement

While patient engagement is grabbing plenty of headlines, leaders need to know what’s really happening on the frontlines. HIMSS Analytics Patient Engagement Insights, a study based on a quantitative survey of leaders from 114 healthcare organizations as well as a qualitative focus group that involved nine of these executives, sheds some light on the issue. The findings: Healthcare leaders have embarked upon patient engagement initiatives, with nearly nine of 10 organizations having a strategy in place. The primary drivers for these patient engagement strategies include fulfilling the organization’s mission to enhance and improve health (77 percent), supporting initiatives to build a loyal brand for patients (77 percent), and meeting Meaningful Use requirements (60 percent). Technology is playing a key role in pursuing these goals. More specifically, organizations that have a patient engagement strategy in place are turning to patient portal technologies from their current EHR vendors (67 percent), or from health information exchange platform vendors (15 percent), or they are developing their own portals in house (8 percent). These organizations are most commonly using such technology for patient record access/summaries (92 percent), lab test result distribution (90 percent), and secure e-mail/tests with providers (74 percent). But that’s not all. Many organizations are looking to go beyond these basic functions – and have identified the following next-generation functions as most important: e-visits or consultations (64 percent), health evaluation and coaching (54 percent) and interoperability across organizations/platforms (54 percent). In fact, leaders expressed a strong commitment to going beyond basic meaningful use criteria with their patient engagement initiatives. To learn more about the study, click here.   

Dave deBronkart beat stage IV kidney cancer in 2007 by taking an active role in his own health. As a result, he realized how powerful and life-saving patient engagement can be. Since then, he has authored the book, Let Patients Help! A Patient Engagement Handbook, and delivered speeches on the topic at conferences around the world. Through this advocacy work, he has become widely known as “e-Patient Dave.” While he has been trumpeting the patient engagement cause for years, the concept has only recently become a hot-button issue in healthcare. In fact, the industry has reached a tipping point and is ready from philosophical, technical and financial standpoints to throw its arms around patient engagement. Indeed, nearly three-quarters of the 330 respondents to the 26th Annual HIMSS Leadership Survey indicated that consumer and patient considerations, such as patient engagement, satisfaction and quality of care, would be the business issue that would most impact their organization over the course of the next two years. Thus, many healthcare organizations are apt to migrate toward creating systems that offer the interoperable data to support such initiatives. As observed by deBronkart, that could lead to the type of patient engagement that transforms the care experience: “When interoperable data becomes accessible to the ultimate stakeholder, that is, the patient, it has the potential to seed new forms of growth oriented around value as defined by the ultimate stakeholder, the one for whom we do healthcare – patients and their families.” Challenges still abound. With patient engagement still in its early stages, organizations are looking to strategically move toward the real, meaningful engagement that will lead to better outcomes, more cost-effective care and a positive patient experience. To gather additional insight into how healthcare organizations can move forward with such initiatives, HIMSS Analytics published Patient Engagement Insights, a study based on a quantitative survey of leaders from 114 healthcare organizations as well as a qualitative focus group that involved nine of these executives. To learn more about the study, click here.

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Speakers at the Connected Health Conference tackled a central theme in healthcare today: Why isn’t patient engagement catching on more quickly in the real world?

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Another benefit of the initiative? It enabled the health system’s IT shop to connect the dots and create a better patient experience. 

The New York healthcare provider will use the software to enable clinicians to connect with patients via mobile devices. 

HIMSS and UPMC chief innovation officer Rasu Shrestha, MD will tackle some of the biggest questions facing healthcare as the industry moves into more connected care during a tweetchat on Dec. 15.

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