It’s no secret that healthcare providers of all sizes will soon be paid based primarily on the quality of care they provide. Between the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announcing a switch from fee-for-service to value-based reimbursement models by 2018, and Medicare Advantage plans pushing physicians to take on increased risk, financial pressures are on the rise.
As a result of the shift from quantity to quality, the concept of patient engagement is quickly transitioning from a “nice to have” value in a medical practice to an extremely important “must have” element to getting maximum payment for service rendered, whether that service is a routine physical exam or all the care surrounding a diagnosis of diabetes.
Care settings provide the opportunity for face-to-face conversation and dialogue with a patient. But once the patient leaves the office, she’s on her own: Memories fade, and all kinds of things can start to interfere with her ability to follow provider instructions. It’s not necessarily just the treatment itself that determines whether an ailment is cured or managed; it’s the patient’s involvement, or engagement, that plays a significant role in her health.
Without patient engagement, the natural course of a disease is to progress. Progression of disease leads to higher costs of care as further interventions are required, which may include advanced medication regimens, hospitalization for stabilization, or skilled in-house nursing care. As a result, providers must find proactive and more effective ways to engage patients away from the point of care. Many are discovering that this can be challenging, but there are ways to devise and execute a successful patient-engagement program.
First, it’s important to recognize the key characteristics of successful patient engagement programs: They’re personalized and they’re founded on strong relationships.
Adapt to your patient
The intriguing part about humans is that we’re not all the same; there are no one-size-fits-all solutions to keeping patients engaged in their care. There are significant differences across patient demographics and personality types. For example, educated versus non-educated patients, or extroverted versus introverted personality profiles. We all know folks who get sick and tell everybody about it, and others who get sick and act with unwavering military-style stoicism.
Other patients are procrastinators. They’ll put things off for days, weeks, and months, all the while thinking that at some point they’ll “catch up on managing their disease” – provided, of course, that it lets them go to work and continue living their life. How many people wind up in the ER with a heart attack on Thursday, but their symptoms actually started earlier in the week on Monday? To succeed in its mission, a patient engagement program must assume a fluid posture that accounts for various personality types and each patient’s individual and unique motivations for staying healthy.
Strong relationships are key
Any solution for dealing with various kinds of patients must also take into account the overarching importance of strong relationships. Long before Facebook and Twitter, the original social network was one we all grew up with: our family. It’s the opinions and thoughts of people we trust that rise above rhetoric. It’s ultimately through the conduit of strong, useful relationships that providers can legitimately influence patient behavior.
The problem is, without good medical information, patients aren’t truly motivated to go to the doctor. There’s no clinical or medical platform from which to wage an effective case. Social networking and information technology can help bring us to that entirely new level of patient engagement and outcome expectations. Remember the first ATMs? They were very useful but you could only take out $20 at a time and it was difficult to interact with them. Today, the primary screen for a lot of us now is on our smartphones. Technology is being tailored for usefulness and a minimum amount of trouble on the part of the consumer. Uber gets us a car and lets us rank the service. Amazon allows us to quickly search for a product, drop it in a cart and check out. The technological wind is at our back.
The technology for healthcare has a long way to catch up. Most vendors have spent so much effort trying to solve for providers’ needs in delivering care that patients have become an afterthought. It’s going to take some time for healthcare to catch up and create the technology that can foster greater information sharing and improve patient engagement. In the meantime, there are things providers can do to improve patient engagement:
- Recognize yourself as a brand and patients as your customers. Providers need to enter into a framework of decision making based on the fact that patients are consumers. Patients who come to receive care must receive all the data they need to be able to actually “consume” the full experience. Providers have to build on their customer service skills and their consumer relationship with evidence from every episode of care and interaction at the commerce level.
- Expand to improve engagement. Many new programs are available to finance the expansion of practices to engage patients in a way that patients will appreciate. Chronic care management (CCM), for example, is one area to focus on. It delivers what payers are asking for, which is more value-based care versus volume-based care. CCM also gives practices an opportunity to engage patients between visits, reinforcing the doctor-patient relationship.
- Acknowledge that care is not done in a vacuum. Social networking has fostered a powerful realization of the importance of socially interacting with others. Many physicians might believe that a computer program is all they need to promote patient engagement, but the reality is that healthcare is still very much a social interaction. Tell patients you will call them in six months for the next set of appointments. Be proactive on their behalf.As an example, dentists have done a great job in this area. They know that you only need to come in twice a year, but they’re very effective at calling and reminding you it’s time again. There is a sense that the practice is watching out for you. In a practical sense, proactively reaching out to your patient as a consumer will result in greater patient engagement.
Healthcare is a long-term game, not a short-term game. Building a lasting relationship is the best way to ensure enduring patient engagement. In other words, being useful after today is what ultimately makes patients engaged for tomorrow.
