Patient engagement is easily one of the hot-button topics in healthcare these days, but physician engagement may be catching up.
According to a recent survey by The Advisory Board Company, the latter form of engagement was listed by healthcare CEOs as the biggest opportunity to improve the healthcare system in 2015.
“More executives were interested in identifying best practices for engaging physicians in cost and quality improvements than in any other topic in the poll – a notable change from the previous year’s poll, when physician engagement was the third-ranked area of interest,” The Advisory Board Company noted.
The topic of physician engagement was cited more than twice the amount of other topics, with almost 90 percent of hospitals and health systems calling attention to the matter.
“Our research underscores that physician engagement is imperative to an organization’s successful transition to value-based care models,” Chas Roades, chief research officer at The Advisory Board Company, said in a statement. “Driving fundamental and sustainable changes to providers’ business model is impossible without buy-in from the clinicians on the frontlines of patient care.”
Specifically, there are five areas that providers should explore when it comes to physician engagement:
— Engaging physicians in cost and quality improvements
— Redesigning service portfolios for population health
— Strengthening primary care physician alignment
— Utilizing direct-to-employer contracting
— Controlling avoidable utilization
The Advisory Board Company surveyed 157 C-suite executive members in December 2014.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
