Lots of health systems pay lip service to patient-centric care, but what does that really mean? As healthcare continues its transition to paying for value and outcomes, toward managing wellness rather than treating disease, making the patient an active participant in the process is more important than ever.
Some hospitals and health systems are better at doing this that others. Certainly many have worked in earnest these past few years to do it well. And no question, there's a wide array of different tips, tricks and tools to getting patient engagement right.
At the Patient Engagement & Experience Summit, which takes place Monday, March 5, at HIMSS18 in Las Vegas, experts from across healthcare — clinicians, technologists, patient advocates, chief experience officers, and others — will gather for a day-long event to compare notes and share success stories and best practices for getting patient populations more involved with and attentive to their own healthcare.
Just as important, some speakers will focus on the patient experience — ensuring that care delivery in hospitals, physician practices and post-acute care settings is respectful and responsive to specific needs — perhaps even enjoyable.
Both engagement and experience are necessary in the era of accountable care, after all. The former is key to care coordination, chronic disease management, medication adherence and reductions in readmissions – all critical for value-based reimbursement. The latter can be the difference in creating a competitive edge compared with the hospital across town.
The Patient Engagement & Experience Summit, co-presented by HIMSS and the Cleveland Clinic, will convene providers, payers, policymakers and others to offer well-honed advice on the technologies and strategies that can help improve on both counts.
The day's events will be emceed by Adrienne Boissy, chief experience officer at Cleveland Clinic Health System.
Other speakers will include Pracha Eamranond, senior vice president medical affairs and population health at Harvard Medical School's Lawrence General Hospital; Larry Chu, professor of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine at Stanford; David Asche, executive director of Penn Medicine's Center for Health Care Innovation, and Donald Kosiak, chief medical officer at Leidos.
Among the day's topics – which will include shared decision-making, creating incentives to change, virtual care, telehealth, social determinants and more – there will be three case studies that aim to offer a real-world perspective on the value of patient engagement and experience.
In one, Derek Novak, vice president and chief operating officer at Mercy Health Network ACO, will explain how Mercy's data platform helped it to break down silos and implement a multi-part strategy to enhance patient engagement — leading to 7.14 percent lower 30-day readmission rates and a reduction in utilization by 6.5 percent.
In another, Maia Hightower, CMIO, and Pamela Kunert, nurse informaticist, at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, will show how several bedside technologies allow for easy digital meal ordering, device-viewable educational content and even adjustable mood lighting — offering inpatients more autonomy over the experience of their hospital stay.
In the third, Mohsen Saidinejad, director of patient experience at Harbor UCLA Medical Center, will discuss a series of mobile health tools aimed at reducing health disparities among underserved patient populations. Smartphones, now near-ubiquitous, offer a valuable means to reach all strata of society, Saidinejad says, and can help with treatment adherence monitoring, health education resources, follow-up appointment reminders, and more.
By identifying some of the challenges and obstacles through focus group testing, some strategies to overcome these barriers will be discussed. Challenges will be addressed both from the standpoint at provider level issues as well as patient and family level issues.
In the day's closing keynote, longtime patient engagement expert Jan Oldenburg will offer some insights derived from the many in-depth interviews she conducted with patients and caregivers her HIMSS book, Participatory Healthcare: A Person-Centered Approach to Healthcare Transformation.
She sees a lot of room for improvement.
"Look at the ways people have gotten creative with online banking and shopping — anticipating the needs we might have, offering suggestions based on analytics about what we've done in the past and our patterns of behavior," Oldenburg told Healthcare IT News this past year. "We could be doing that for health."
The HIMSS Patient Engagement & Experience Summit is scheduled for Monday, March 5, from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at Wynn Las Vegas.
