Patient Engagement
In my last two posts, I have covered some very basic points on motivation, and simple causes of why people get demotivated. So why now you might be asking is he talking about Patient engagemeent. Well to be quite frank if aa a physician I am unable to determine whether or not my patient is motivated in the way the view their health attitudes and behaviours, it is highly unlikely I am going to succeed in getting patients to follow my advice and do what i ask of them.
Patient engagement can be defined as an ideal healthcare situation in which the patient is well informed about, and motivated ,to be involved with their own medical care, by allowing their knowledge, skills, ability and willingness to manage their own health care with specific interventions to increase activation and promote positive health behaviours.
If we can achieve this "Ideal" state it would mean we have willing patients participating in their care with a clinician providing those interventions. When we have these willing patients which should be a necessity, it will ultimately drive down health care associated costs and provide betteroutcomes for the patient.
Patient engagement actually requires the patient to actively do something whether it be interactions with clinicians, patient portals for scheduling appointments, or checking their own medical records.
Now it is not necessarily true to say that because the patient is engaged that they are having a pleasant experience and often these two concepts are disconnected from one another.
So when we talk about patient engagement we may not always be concerned about the experience they are having and vice versa.
Now in steps Technology companies and they try to quantify patient enagagement and experience but their concept of what this is somtetimes very simplistically is based on how many downloads of an app, or how many clicks on a website. However in this day and age of evidence based medicine, and levels of evidence, this really doesnt cut the cake so to speak.
However Technology certainly can have a significant role to play in quantifying some of these metrics. One of the biggest things physicians have is evalauating these metrics which typically until recently were just now measurable, and unfortunately we cannot manage what we cannot measure, or we certainly cannot evaluate whether or not our interventions are truly effective.
Since 2007 and the development of what is known as the quantified self people are now lifelogging, blogging, and starting to acquire this data measures for some of which were once deemed immeasureable. The recent explosion in smartphones and other devices over the last ten years have really advanced some of our understandings and we can now start measuring some of these datasets.
Now if we want to ensure that the patient is having both a pleasent experience whilst being engaged in the process we should be looking as health care providers or institutions with adopt the growth marketing terminology and translating it into a new language of healthcare hospitality and redrawing the virtuous cycle for patients to look like...
This newly defined virtuous cycle of healthcare would now have a nomenclature translated from and cross-referenced against modern business practices, and engage the cycle with potent understanding and learnings from communication and hospitality professionals.
The now the next big questions are How are we going to measure these metrics and secondly How are we going to analyse all this data that is going to be produced?. Should this be outsourced to big data companies that you cannot gaurantee what is going to with the data, or does this need to be introduced into its own ecosystem, and latter seems the most probable with the recent developments in the blockchain.
Tomorrow I shall cover some of the companies now stepping into this realm and what is in the pipeline for healthcare and the blockchain.
