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!!!