The In’s and Out’s of Patient Engagement

The healthcare industry has been buzzing about the concept of Patient Engagement for a little while now, but what exactly is it? Patient engagement is the general idea of involving patients more in their care through various avenues, such as increased communication with doctors, greater access to medical records, or a more user friendly interface for accessing health-related information. Patient engagement can be applied broadly to numerous healthcare sectors and places responsibility on all individuals that are involved in a patient’s well-being- the patient, physician, support staff, friends and family.

Why has Patient Engagement become a new ideal that healthcare facilities, practitioners, and health technologies are collaboratively working to achieve? Greater patient activation, or one’s knowledge, skills and confidence to engage in their own care process, has been demonstrated to lower average costs for care and engage in better preventative health habits. Patients largely want to be a more active participant in their own care, and, with the right accessibility to their own records and other information, will possess the knowledge to make informed decisions.

This recent trend towards increased Patient Engagement is encouraging greater accessibility to information of all kinds- personal medical records, general information about conditions, and easier communication with physicians. In fact, Kaiser Permanente Northwest and eight other healthcare systems have recently signed onto Open Notes, a program designed to give patients access to doctor’s notes from any location. For patients, this kind of tool is empowering; patients feel more in control of their care, are more likely to follow prescription medication directions, and are more prepared for following doctor visits. Physicians can better communicate with their patients and collaboratively, can develop a more effective treatment plan.

Now, healthcare IT is jumping on the opportunity to develop information sharing programs to facilitate increased Patient Engagement. These programs are intended to engage both physicians and patients, increase compliance by setting up reminders regarding medications, and integrate information from various medical record systems, among-st numerous other features. Not only will such technologies improve understanding, communication, and delivery between physicians and patients, but most importantly, will improve health. The accessibility of personal and public medical information is only growing and providing new methods to increase Patient Engagement in their own care. 

Patient Engagement - An innovative way to be healthier

These days, the Healthcare and life sciences companies started moving towards inculcating a new trend, also pushing hard the providers to transform from traditional healthcare practice to an Interoperable system approach , which is quite a big challenge for healthcare industry especially while providing wellness solution for patients. Patient Engagement, the new buzz phrase of health care industry & the people associated with the healthcare industry started giving more attention towards it. Today the contemporary health care system is composite, where in many patients find difficult to get, process, communicate, and realize even basic health information & facilities since there is no specific patient engagement system is incorporated.

Patient engagement is not simply easy. It comprises lot of challenges that are to be faced by the healthcare service providers. To begin with, Patient engagement isn’t just taking care of patients, more than that it refers to patient’s activeness, behaviors further endless participation in managing their health. This transformation is a challenging one for both patients and the physicians end. Here comes the role of technology, which remains as a key component in transforming healthcare patient engagement also helps to bridge the gap in care coordination for a patient from a provider with the assistance of Patient Engagement Software. However technology is essential to engage patients, if we look deeply into the provider behaviors and processes those are very tougher to change practically plus getting adopt to the new Interoperable systems.

Many researchers say that patients who know and take act with respect to their personal health & health care choices will have improved health upshots as well as have minor healthcare overheads. The more we engage and become active participants in our own health, the less healthcare services we'll need and healthier lives we'll lead. Once a patient is informed and empowered, they will have more control over their healthcare circumstance. Similarly when a physician follows up with those patients, they have well understanding on what the patient just went through hence this coordination closes the gap in patient care. Yet, Patient engagement isn’t simply the concern of the healthcare service providers. Though everyone in healthcare is speaking about patient engagement, only few knows how to realize it.

The present scenario in patient engagement is majorly focusing on mobile apps and patient portals, there is still a lot to be done. We can say as grouping of Smart mobility, cloud computing, social networking and big data analytics together for working. Yes, it’s a great challenge that has to be faced by the health care industry, on seeing the other hand it has plenty of opportunities in it. A drastic shift from hospital and doctor’s clinic to wherever the patient happens to be. This enables a new vision of providing health care everywhere- a potential way to have an expanded access alone with improved outcomes!!!

Patient Engagement Framework – An innovative way to be healthier

Patient Engagement Framework – An innovative way to be healthier

Many researchers say that patients who know and take act with respect to their personal health and health care choices, will have improved health upshots and have minor healthcare overheads. The more we engage and become active participants in our own health, the less healthcare services we'll need and healthier lives we'll lead. Hence, it is vital that healthcare service providers to concentrate on patient engagement.  Patient Engagement system is an interactive medium for patients and Health & Life Sciences organizations to improve health outcomes.

Yet, Patient engagement isn’t simply the concern of the healthcare service providers. Effective Patient Engagement is achieved only when the patients turn into actively involved and healthcare system erudite which means the patients should know their role in the healthcare practice cycle. Recognizing this win-win opportunity, Health and Life Sciences executives are seeking the right balance of incentives and online tools to engage consumers in proactively improving their health habits as a means to not only control medical costs but also improve the health of their patients, members or consumers.

With a large number of successful deployments of Healthcare solutions, iLink exclusively focuses on Patient Engagement system and offer implementation and support services, education, and software enhancement services. iLink’s Patient Engagement Framework provides wellness solutions for patients by consolidating personal health information into one easily accessible account. This helps them to become more informed and active in managing their personal health.

The Patient Engagement Framework can help boost personal well-being, cut health care costs and increase participation in clinical studies and other activities that benefit the patient and the health and life sciences industry iLink's Patient Engagement Framework is an inter operable framework that allows Health and Life Sciences organizations to directly engage members in health-related decision-making, while enabling seamless information exchange among hundreds of different health services and devices.

Engaging patients/members/consumers fully and effectively requires real-time collaboration capabilities, including the ability to discuss the same information through multiple channels such as smart phones, text messaging, instant messaging, virtual chat agents, email, and web conferencing. Collaboration features include:

·         Unify information presented on member, coach, physician, and health worker portals

·         Integrate information from various medical systems

·         Facilitate end-to-end collaboration between patients, members, coaches, physicians, and other healthcare providers by enabling aggregation, organization, and search capabilities

·         Deliver data and information to patients and members wherever they are through mobile channels

·         Unify communication between patients, members and coaches

·         As a healthcare Solution provider, iLink can offer an effective Patient engagement solution by using Patient Engagement Framework that gives the patients as well the healthcare service providers the following benefits,

·         Increases the influence of Providers, Health Plans, Pharma and Care Managers by politely engaging patients/members in conversations at the appropriate time

·         Requests daily or weekly updates on various health benchmarks from patients/members while delivering tips to them on healthy living

·         Provides instant feedback on self-monitoring to shape and reinforce health behaviors

·         Issues reminders regarding scheduled medication, testing, and doctor appointments

·         Reduces recruitment time for clinical trials with online screening

·         Monitors patient behaviors with social media and mobile devices

·         Works more effectively with patients and family members to increase compliance and build relationships.

List of iLink Software Development Frameworks

List of iLink Software Development Frameworks

  Introduction

       iLink frameworks are ready-to-deploy solutions that are built with an intent to solve standard problems        found in an industry vertical or in a horizontal practice.

  Value proposition

• Frameworks are free to use - get 20% of your problems out of the way for free.
• Frameworks offer reliable and quality solutions – built on Microsoft technologies and hence guarantee high scalability, flexibility and availability.
• Ready-to-deploy solutions will help you save precious development cycles.
• Be fully convinced before adopting a solution – you can experience and evaluate our frameworks live in action.
•  Frameworks help you minimize risks associated with your initiative - industry best practices and design patterns incorporated in the framework development ensure robustness.
• Robust frameworks will help you reduce the time to take your solutions to market.
•  Re-usable frameworks allow fast and easy customizations to suit your business needs.

       Why is iLink different?

•        We let you evaluate our expertise upfront through frameworks that demonstrate -
•        Our domain expertise reflected through identification of business critical problems of a given industry 
•        Our technology expertise reflected through our ability to apply cutting edge technologies to deliver     high quality solutions
•       Our frameworks help you verify the feasibility of our proposed solutions before you decide to adapt them in your critical business applications
•       "What you see is what you get" - frameworks are ready-to-use
•        Frameworks are designed to be reusable – a team of experts can quickly customize our existing  frameworks to suit your business needs
•      Our frameworks are already helping AT & T, Siemens, Honeywell and NCE solve their critical business problems.

            iLink’s frameworks are currently offered free of any licensing costs and provided as part of development  of solution to you.

•                 IntranetFramework  
•                 Situational Awareness Framework
•                 OpstracFramework
•                 PatientEngagement Framework
•                 RemedyConnector Framework
•                 LegalCase Management Framework
•                 SelfService BI Framework
•                 MobilityFramework
•                 RetailBI Framework
•                 SubpoenaManagement Framework

       

            To get more information on these frameworks please visit here http://www.ilink-systems.com/ThinkingBeyond/iLinkFrameworkOffers.aspx or contact Suresh@ilink-systems.com (Ph: 404-536-2702).