By Noreen Hurley, Director, Healthcare Business Solutions at Informatica and Saeed Aminzadeh, CEO, Decision Point Healthcare Solutions
It’s an accepted truth that a strong doctor-patient relationship is essential for effective healthcare. Healthcare engagement is the emotional, financial, physical, and social involvement or commitment a patient has with the healthcare ecosystem. So, when someone asks why should we care about healthcare engagement? The answer is simple: because it impacts every area of a healthcare system – from the patient’s physical health to the financial health of an organization.
Evidence of engagement with the healthcare system manifests itself in many different ways. For finance, it affects voluntary disenrollment from the health plan, satisfaction, appeals and grievances. For individual health and wellbeing, it is evident in the lifestyle choices and preventive care people adopt. For the healthcare delivery system, engagement can determine provider selection, satisfaction and out-of-network use. In clinical care, engagement is manifested in compliance – adherence to care plans, recommendations and prescriptions, as well as secondary and tertiary prevention. Clearly, benefits exist to getting engagement right.
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By Noreen Hurley, Director, Healthcare Business Solutions at Informatica and Saeed Aminzadeh, CEO, Decision Point Healthcare Solutions
It’s an accepted truth that a strong doctor-patient relationship is essential for effective healthcare. Healthcare engagement is the emotional, financial, physical, and social involvement or commitment a patient has with the healthcare ecosystem. So, when someone asks why should we care about healthcare engagement? The answer is simple: because it impacts every area of a healthcare system – from the patient’s physical health to the financial health of an organization.
Evidence of engagement with the healthcare system manifests itself in many different ways. For finance, it affects voluntary disenrollment from the health plan, satisfaction, appeals and grievances. For individual health and wellbeing, it is evident in the lifestyle choices and preventive care people adopt. For the healthcare delivery system, engagement can determine provider selection, satisfaction and out-of-network use. In clinical care, engagement is manifested in compliance – adherence to care plans, recommendations and prescriptions, as well as secondary and tertiary prevention. Clearly, benefits exist to getting engagement right.
Barriers To Healthcare Engagement
Despite the healthcare industry’s attempted focus on patient engagement and the desire by many for it to make a move to the consumer, many practices and plans have not adopted technology to move engagement forward – particularly predictive analytics. In fact, a Chilmark Research report finds that, although patient engagement is a fast-growing trend, most practices have little technology to encourage engagement beyond basic patient portals. Further, according to a survey of health care stakeholders by the Center of Advancing Health, each stakeholder representative noted that they use a variety of interventions to encourage patient engagement. However, their efforts to promote engagement often lack a systematic approach to ground their investment of time and resources.
Healthcare engagement analytics provides insights into how members and patients will behave and why. By definition, member behavior is non-linear and multi-faceted. Creating meaningful engagement analytics requires accessing data of all types, including big data.
Payer And Provider Solutions For Improving Engagement
Payer organizations can collect and analyze data to identify opportunities for more informed care management and segmentation to reach new, high-value customers in individual markets. For example, by using analytics to gain a 360-degree view of members, payers can drive new member programs, retention and sales initiatives.
In the provider space, relationship building can be a little more challenging. This is because patients do not typically interact with their doctors unless they are sick, which can create gaps in the data. Therefore, analyzing populations of patients, fostering patient engagement based on Meaningful Use/Accountable Care requirements, and building out referral networks are essential ingredients in consumer engagement. When provider organizations have a better understanding of their patients and providers, they can increase patient satisfaction and proactively offer preventative care to patients before an episode occurs. They can also identify patients who are most at risk prior to the onset of a disease. These activities result in increased patient engagement, differentiation and improved outcomes.
Bottom Line
Healthcare and data have the ability to create strong provider/payer-patient relationships, but like most marriages, it’s not all roses. Data is needy. It requires investments in connectedness, cleanliness and safety to maximize its potential. For both payers and providers, an essential ingredient to achieving engagement through analytics is using clean, safe and connected data. And, although analytics and data maturity across healthcare lags other industries, the opportunity to positively impact clinical and operational outcomes is significant.
