Strategies to Empower Patients and Support Patients’ Rights.
Most healthcare outcome improvements are attributed to clinical, operational, or financial process changes in the acute care setting. It’s often skilled clinicians who get the credit for reducing readmissions, length of stay, or costs of care—and rightfully so.
But patients, too, can play a considerable role in improving their own care. Many patients, especially those with chronic conditions, want to play this role; they just need the assets (e.g., tools, information, environments) to participate. Data and digitized health—and instruction on how to use them—are proven means for building patient empowerment strategies. This shifts the balance of care from the hospital and clinician to the community and patient, and produces meaningful, patient-centered outcomes.Strategies to Empower Patients and Support Patients’ Rights.
If clinicians can understand how data empowers their patients, and why empowerment is important, they can realize greater efficiencies in clinical processes and achieve outstanding outcome improvements. As highlighted in this article, unique case studies around the world show the powerful impact of data-driven patient engagement.Strategies to Empower Patients and Support Patients’ Rights.
Empowering patients is giving patients control over healthcare in ways that clinicians may not typically consider. Patients want ownership over the things that matter most to them, such as measuring and monitoring their own biometrics and having access to condition-specific information when and where they want it. Clinicians can help patients understand the important role patients have in managing their own health challenges.Strategies to Empower Patients and Support Patients’ Rights.
Beyond the time they spend with doctors and nurses, patients with chronic disease spend 5,000 hours a year on other activities that directly affect their health: deciding what to eat or drink, deciding how certain exercise and activities will impact their lives, and deciding what medications to take and what medical advice to follow. These decisions take place outside the clinical setting, yet the typical healthcare model focuses on optimizing the limited time patients spend with their doctors. Empowering patients means giving them data—and the technology and education to process it—so they can more effectively use, or reduce, those 5,000 hours. Many unique programs exist to demonstrate the positive impact and time-saving potential of empowering patients with technology.Strategies to Empower Patients and Support Patients’ Rights.
The NHS in the United Kingdom is successfully using a program that gives patients more control over their daily, at-home care and optimizes the time they spend on these activities. A team at NHS Stoke on Trent (now Stoke Clinical Commissioning Group) created the program, Florence (Flo). Flo is a simple telehealth system that uses mobile text messages to help people manage their chronic conditions and other healthcare issues. Flo sends patients reminders and helpful tips customized to their needs, whether it’s managing diabetes, living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or learning how to breastfeed. It’s a perfect illustration of using data and digital health to empower patients to manage their disease.Strategies to Empower Patients and Support Patients’ Rights.
Empowered patients are a potent resource for generating outcomes improvement. Empowering them with data and innovative ways to manage their own care can generate impressive results. Here are five ways data empowers patients to become owners of their own healthcare journeys.
Patient engagement has been likened to a blockbuster drug that, if not used, should be considered a form of malpractice. Empowering patients with easily accessible and actionable data increases their engagement and results in better clinical outcomes, greater patient satisfaction, and lower costs.Strategies to Empower Patients and Support Patients’ Rights.
Kaiser Permanente ran a Collaborative Cardiac Care Service pilot program that used technology and data to develop patient engagement through proactive patient outreach and education. Patients in the program had an 88 percent reduced risk of dying of a cardiac-related cause when enrolled within 90 days of a heart attack, compared to those not in the program. Clinical care teams reduced overall mortality by 76 percent and cardiac
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