NeHC Survey: Engaging Consumers is Critical to Healthcare’s Future

The future of healthcare must include consumer engagement in eHealth, according to a new survey of stakeholders by the National eHealth Collaborative (NeHC) and its partner HealthCAWS, a healthcare services company.

Stakeholders were asked to share their experience with the role of consumer engagement in the overall transformation of healthcare, and overwhelmingly agreed that consumer engagement is a top priority:

• 96 percent strongly agree that engaging consumers in their care is critical to transformation
• 86 percent believe consumer engagement is very important, the highest rank for the question, to their organization

Participants were asked to select from a list of tools and services, those that were important to their consumer engagement efforts.  The following selections were most frequently chosen as important to support an organization's consumer engagement efforts, and as a whole, indicate the need to work with multiple partners from associations, government agencies and solution service providers to engage consumers:

• Networking with colleagues (69 percent)
• NeHC Patient Engagement Framework (63 percent)
• Programs from the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health IT (59 percent)
• Vendor support (59 percent)
• NeHC tools and resources (47 percent)

To support their efforts, NeHC and HealthCAWS are building up the Solutions Directory feature of the NeHC Consumer eHealth Readiness Tool (CeRT)—powered by HealthCAWS—to house a database of consumer engagement solutions and supporters available to the healthcare community.  The CeRT Solutions Directory is specifically designed to showcase organizations committed to advancing consumer engagement and the many companies that provide technology solutions, system integration, services or other products and services that support patient and their family engagement, NeHC says.