MedCity Influencers, Patient Engagement

Using automation to overcome barriers to patient engagement

Automated approaches remove the burden of and yield wide-ranging benefits for providers looking to engage more closely with patients following an episode of care.

As healthcare transitions from a fee-for-service to a pay-for-performance model, healthcare providers increasingly recognize that patient engagement is an important aspect of delivering high quality care at a lower cost. However, although better engagement is nearly a universal goal in healthcare, barriers exist.

Almost 63 percent of respondents to a 2017 NEJM Catalyst Insights Council survey on patient engagement calls the time investment required by health teams the biggest challenge in designing patient engagement into care delivery. Fifty-four percent of providers see patient adoption as another big hurdle and 52 percent cite provider adoption as a challenge in designing patient engagement into care delivery.

How can providers reap the rewards of effective patient engagement without placing additional administrative responsibilities on care teams? The answer is automation.

Automating engagement

Hospitals have been implementing a variety of patient engagement programs to ensure good care transitions and mitigate potentially preventable complications and readmissions. Some of these approaches, such as frequent telephone follow-up until a discharged patient has a post-discharge appointment with a healthcare provider, are highly human resource intensive.

But other approaches exist that are not as time intensive and don’t require major changes to clinician workflows. Interactive voice response systems automate phone call outreach to patients and trigger notifications to healthcare members when a patient provides a response that is concerning. Other approaches leverage email and digital tools using automated digital patient engagement platforms to send patients check-in emails containing guidance and remote monitoring.

These automated approaches remove the burden of and yield wide-ranging benefits for providers looking to engage more closely with patients following an episode of care.

Making engagement easy

Automated daily engagement gets the right information to the right patient at the right time, greatly reducing calls to the office with questions about health and recovery. The inquiries that do come in can usually be handled by front-linenon-clinical staff, which takes the burden off of physicians to return phone calls. The reduction in call volume frees up physicians to spend more time with patients.

When an engagement solution does the heavy lifting of providing remote guidance and monitoring, providers no longer have to prioritize monitoring only those patients with higher readmission risk. They can now support all patients following a hospital stay. Daily patient engagement with an automated system has been shown to reduce hospital readmissions by 38 percent and medical complications by 33 percent. This is a powerful way to deliver better care at a lower cost.

Engaging patients through empathic, condition-specific content and friendly reminders delivers a delightful experience to patients. Without any additional effort by clinicians, these satisfied patients are prompted to share their positive experiences online and the vast majority are “extremely likely to recommend” their physician to family and friends. These positive reviews not only make a healthcare organization look good, they lead to more market share.

Lightening the load on care teams

Clinicians face higher productivity expectations and administrative burden than ever. Placing a personnel-intensive patient engagement program on their shoulders is a recipe for failure.

Technology tools represent a far more efficient method of daily engagement and offer a promising way to improve the quality of care while reducing costs.

Since any new system will affect clinical workflow, it is crucial that a new engagement solution offers the flexibility to either stand alone or integrate with the electronic health record. Care teams need tools that improve coordination and communication and do not require extra time and effort. For this reason, organizations should also seek out tools that are adaptable to varying levels of readiness, staffing, and provider alignment. 

Organizations that embrace automated engagement solutions will reap the rewards of healthier, more satisfied patients.

Photo: ipopba, Getty Images


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Todd Johnson

Todd Johnson, CEO of HealthLoop, has a long history in the healthcare technology space and is a serial entrepreneur committed to building innovative products that engage patients and connect them to their care team. Todd joined HealthLoop in 2012 as CEO to develop an automated way patients can check in with their providers. Under Todd’s direction the company is now implemented at over 40 health systems and physician practices including prestigious institutions like Cedars Sinai and UCSF.

Prior to joining HealthLoop, Todd was the founder and CEO of Salar, Inc – a Baltimore, MD based provider of acute care physician charge capture and documentation solution. Working with the nation’s leading medical centers and physicians, Todd grew Salar to a successful acquisition in 2011.

This post appears through the MedCity Influencers program. Anyone can publish their perspective on business and innovation in healthcare on MedCity News through MedCity Influencers. Click here to find out how.

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