In the wake of the events of the past three days, namely the proposed weakening of patient engagement requirements in Meaningful Use Stage 2 and the subsequent, fiery response from former national health IT coordinator Dr. Farzad Mostashari and other patient advocates, it was not surprising to hear that hospital CIOs also are deeply interested in patient engagement.
“Patient engagement is top of mind,” Jennifer Horowitz, senior director of research for HIMSS Analytics said Monday in releasing the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s 26th annual survey of health IT leaders.
Indeed, consumer and patient considerations topped the list of business issues affecting care delivery, named by 72 percent of respondents to the sur ey. That was closely followed by privacy/security, changing payment models and policy mandates, each at 71 percent, while 70 percent said the ability to share patient information is impacting the delivery of care.
Horowitz said that these high numbers show how many things CIOs and other health IT professionals are grappling with now.
Panelists assembled for the survey release talked quite a bit about patient engagement, and not just because the press corps asked.
“We’re not going to improve the health of populations if we don’t engage patients in their own care,” said Dr. Bill Feaster, CMIO of Children’s Hospital of Orange County in Orange, Calif. He said it is somewhat easier at a pediatric hospital because parents often are more interested in the health of their children than they are in their own health.
Not all the panelists were so bullish, however.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
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“Patient engagement is almost a cliché,” offered HIMSS board member Dr. Paul Kleeberg, CMIO of Stratis Health, a Bloomington, Minn.-based nonprofit that promotes patient safety. Kleeberg said he prefers to talk about patient and consumer “empowerment.”
Myra Davis, CIO of Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, suggested that Mostashari might have a point in criticizing the planned rollback of Stage 2 rules, albeit for a different reason. “It’s almost an insult to go from 5 percent to one patient, from a CIO perspective, after all the work we had to go through to get there,” Davis said.
Feaster, for one, said that healthcare providers should be looking beyond simply offering EHR portals for their patients. “There are other ways to engage with patients than a portal,” he said. He said secure texting works well with teenagers, for example.
Still, the HIMSS survey indicated that 87 percent of respondents provide a portal as an element of their patient engagement strategies, while 82 percent see their organizational website as an engagement tool. Only 57 percent leverage social media in this regard.
