E-Patient Update: The Patient Data Engagement Leader

As healthcare delivery models shift responsibility for patient health to the patients themselves, it’s becoming more important to give them tools to help them get and stay healthy. Increasingly, digital health tools are filling the bill.

For example, portals are moving from largely billing and scheduling apps to exchanging of patient data, holding two-way conversations between patient and doctor and even tracking key indicators like blood glucose levels. Wearables are slowly becoming capable of helping doctors improve diagnoses, and patterns revealed by big data should soon be used to create personalized treatment plants.

The ultimate goal of all this, of course, is to push as much data power as possible into the hands of consumers. After all, for patients to be engaged with their health, it helps to make them feel in control, and the more sophisticated information they get, the better choices they can make. Or at least that’s how the traditional script reads.

Now, as an e-patient, the above is certainly true for me. Every incremental improvement in the data I get me brings me closer to taking on otherwise overwhelming health challenges. That’s true, in part, because I’m comfortable reading charts, extrapolating conclusions from data points and visualizing ways to make use of the information. But if you want less tech-friendly patients to get on board, they’re going to need help.

The patient engagement leader

And where will that help come from? I’d argue that hospitals and clinics need to create a new position dedicated to helping engage patients, including though not limited to helping them make their health data their own. This position would cut across several disciplines, ranging from patient health education clinical medicine to data analytics.

The person owning this position would need to be current in patient engagement goals across the population and by disease/condition type, understand the preferred usage patterns established by the hospital, ACO, delivery network or clinic and understand trends in health behavior well enough to help steer patients in the right direction.

It also wouldn’t hurt if such a person had a healthy dose of marketing skills under their belt, as part of the patient engagement process is simply selling consumers on the idea that they can and should take more responsibility for their health outcomes. Speaking from personal experience, a good marketer can wheedle, nudge and empower people by turns, and this will be very necessary to boost your engagement.

While this could be a middle management position, it would at least need to have the full support of the C-suite. After all, you can’t promote population-wide improvements in health by nibbling around the edges of the problem. Such measures need to be comprehensive and strategic to the mission of the healthcare organization as a whole, and the person behind the needs to have the authority to see them through.

Patients in control

If things go right, establishing this position would lead to the creation of a better-educated, more-confident patient population with a greater sense of self efficacy regarding their health. While specific goals would vary from one healthcare organization to the other, such an initiative would ideally lead to improvements in key metrics such as A1c levels population-wide, drops in hospital admission and readmission rates and simultaneously, lower spending on more intense modes of care.

Not only that, you could very well see patient satisfaction increase as well. After all, patients may not feel capable of making important health changes on their own, and if you help them do that it stands to reason that they’ll appreciate it.

Ultimately, engaging patients with their health calls for participation by everyone who touches the patient, from techs to the physician, nurses to the billing department. But if you put a patient engagement officer in place, it’s more likely that these efforts will have a focus.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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