On Oct. 23, Intel is hosting its Healthcare Innovation Summit webcasts. These brief sessions will feature roundtable discussions with experts on the next wave of healthcare technology, plus live Q&A so you can ask questions to those who are on the forefront of health IT transformation. Register for the webcast series here.
Leading up to the online webcasts, we have asked industry leaders to share some of their thoughts on the future of healthcare technology. Here is a guest blog from Cristine Kao, global marketing manager at Carestream Health, Inc., on patient engagement. Give it a read and let us know what you think.
The recent release of Stage 2 Meaningful Use rules and linkage of patient communication measures to incentive payments has healthcare’s C-Suite taking stock of their engagement strategies. In Stage 2, providers allow 50 percent of patients to view download and send their health information online within four days of the information being available. Five percent must be able to view, download or share relevant health information with a third party like a specialist.
These “consumerized healthcare” measures have the potential to be one of the most transformative aspects of reform on the quality of care. Take the impact on patient satisfaction: A study published in JACR in April 2012 found that “nearly 80 percent of patients preferred the patient portal method over other methods of information notification, such as phone calls, mailed letters or in-person clinical consultation.” Or the ability for patient access to radiology results to eliminate the cost of duplicate radiographic exams and patient exposure to radiation: In 2010 Frost & Sullivan reported that “over 10 percent of diagnostic examinations and procedures could be wasteful duplications due to non-availability or intermittent access to the patient's previous clinical data and records.”
Patient engagement is a good thing for our 21st century healthcare system, but we must recognize the challenge it poses to a provider’s IT strategy.
A patient portal engagement strategy must be built on these six principles to provide enough value for the patients to go online, and stay online:
1. Offer comprehensive access to full patient information.
2. Integrate core patient services such as demographic updates, paying bills and viewing lab and imaging exam results, as well as providing access to physicians if necessary.
3. Have a simple and intuitive user interface so patients do not require dedicated training or support.
4. Cannot dictate nor predict what device or operating system patients have. Thus, offer a vendor or device neutral viewer that does not require installation or download.
5. Include both consent management and customizable settings for administrators (critical results release) and patients (sharing options).
6. Distribute security protocols with access control rules, encryption, auditing, hardened servers, session-only service calls and configurable secured environments.
Patient engagement, like any IT change management project, requires plenty of detailed process mapping, user (patient) education and enterprise communication. After all, even the greatest technology is not effective unless you have proper adoption and process to sustain it.
How are you addressing patient engagement in your operational design?
