Navigating The Patient Engagement Equation
By Bob Rossi, vice president, CDW Healthcare
There’s a new sense of urgency in the healthcare community when it comes to expanding patient engagement, and for good reason. Evidence continues to quantify the strong link between more involved patients and improved outcomes. In addition, expanded patient engagement is essential to a provider’s financial viability under a pay-for-performance model.
In 2015, 72 percent of providers in a HIMSS study identified consumer and patient considerations, such as engagement, satisfaction, and quality of care, as the business issue most impacting their organizations during the next two years. With this in mind, CDW Healthcare wanted to take a closer look at the patient engagement equation and the unique perspectives of providers and patients. The resulting Patient Engagement Perspectives Study, based on a survey of 200 patients and 200 healthcare providers, provides new visibility into how needs, challenges, and motivators differ and align between the two groups and how providers can best promote engagement.
Patient And Provider Priorities
Patients and providers are eager for more engagement, according to our research, and both groups are making promising steps to further this important initiative.
In the past two years, 57 percent of patients say they’ve become more engaged with their healthcare. Providers are noticing this increased participation as well, with 70 percent having seen a change in their patients’ level of engagement with their own healthcare in the last two years.
Patients are not universally convinced of their providers’ investment in helping them to improve engagement, however. Only 35 percent of patients say they have noticed their healthcare providers become more engaged with them, compared to 60 percent of providers that say improving patient engagement is a priority. This highlights an interesting divide providers need to address.
The Technology And Communication Foundation
The need to prioritize and better reach patients is clearly there, but how can providers better show their patients that increasing patient engagement is a priority?
research say doing so would help them take a more active role in their care. Not only would online Communication is key. When asked what motivated them to become more engaged, patients rank greater communication with their healthcare provider (50 percent) as being just as influential as a major life event (50 percent).
Technology plays a vital role in expanding communication, especially as clinicians and their staff members face growing patient rosters and time constraints. Increasing online access to health information is a critical first step, as almost three-quarters of patients in our access help patients more easily participate, but 60 percent of providers believe that providing patients with greater online access to their personal healthcare information would help to improve quality of care.
While patients and providers agree on the two most valuable methods for encouraging patient engagement — Web-based access to general healthcare information and online patient portals — there is still some difference in opinion when it comes to preferred methods for communicating. For example, providers see greater value in mobile apps, and patients see greater value in online chat capabilities.
There are more methods for engaging with patients than ever before as we becoming an increasingly connected community, and we are seeing that providers are leveraging these tools to take action. For example, 67 percent of providers say they are working to make online health records easier to access. Additionally, 28 percent of providers say that they either provide or plan to provide patients the ability to merge the information they have stored on their mobile devices or wearable technologies to the online patient portal they offer, which is very encouraging.
Other top online features providers are working to add include:
The Road Ahead
Patients welcome greater engagement, and providers have exponentially more resources at their fingertips than they ever did in years past. However, on the path forward, striking the right chord of incentives and tools to help patients better engage will remain a challenge for providers — although one that is not insurmountable. For providers looking to expand their engagement strategy, look toward leveraging technology to improve patient-provider communication, deliver relevant and timely information to enable informed decisions and better patient outcomes, simplify access to health information and ensure the security of protected health information. Working with a trusted IT partner can help a healthcare organization advance this important objective and power patient care through technology, helping providers to return their focus to their top priority — the patient.
About The Author
Bob Rossi is vice president of healthcare sales for CDW Healthcare, a leading provider of technology solutions to healthcare organizations. Rossi is responsible for creating and executing the go-to-market strategy, driving sales growth and expanding vendor partnerships to serve a variety of clients across the public and private sectors. Rossi joined CDW in 1994 focused on furthering CDW’s penetration into the commercial IT space. After four years of contributing to the successful growth of CDW’s profile in the private sector, Rossi was named as the first director of Federal sales for CDW Government, CDW’s public sector subsidiary. In July 2005, Rossi took his current position to lead CDW’s efforts to execute the strategy for the company’s Healthcare division. In 2009, he was promoted to vice president of CDW Healthcare. Rossi holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Northern Illinois University and an M.B.A. from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.