Drive Better Outcomes with Four Data-Informed Patient Engagement Tactics

Health experts suggest that patient engagement can lead tobetter health outcomesand increased participation in the healthcare decision-making process. Patient engagement means that patients become active members of the care team, regularly communicating with the care team throughout the entire care process to better manage their own health. When care teams inform patients about treatment options and involve them in care decisions, patients become more invested in their health and more accountable to the care team and themselves.

Because each patient has a different level of health literacy and willingness to participate in the care process, engaging patients can be difficult. However, care teams can improve patient engagement by using actionable data to overcome these barriers. Data empowers providers to implement systemwide shared decision-making processes, identify and reduce health disparities, prioritize the patient’s voice, and provide relevant patient education early in the care process.

Improve Patient Engagement: Four Data-Informed Tactics

医疗保健的最佳方法包括从开始到结束的广泛的患者-提供者协作。Four data-driven tactics can foster this two-way communication and help health systems deliver patient-centered care and improve patient engagement:

Tactic 1: Implement Shared Decision-Making Interventions

A key part of patient engagement includes providers and patients making decisions together. To make the most informed decisions, clinicians should consider the patient an active member of the care team. With this collaborative approach, the care team and patient share their perspectives and feedback about the patient’s goals and care plan before making any decisions. Health systems can promote patient engagement through shared decision making systemwide by implementing processes and analytic indicators to measure how often providers utilize the decision support tools.

Access to data about decision support utilization allowedAllina Healthto identify variations in itsshared decision-making process. Although Allina had shared decision-making, analytic insight revealed that clinicians and providers weren’t using the strategies and missing key opportunities to improve patient engagement.

为了利用这些患者参与的机会并增加共享决策对话，Allina的领导们修改了决策流程并更新了工作流程。然后，他们在一个由不同临床领导者组成的监督委员会的帮助下，在一个试点项目中实施了这些改变。Allina用数据来监测试点的成功，以确定哪些领域运行良好，哪些可以改进。The standardized and optimized shared decision-making process resulted in better patient engagement with 749 patients participating in a shared decision-making conversation across the system.

Tactic 2: Advance Health Equity

保健方面的差距使弱势群体(如低收入群体)无法平等获得高质量的保健。卫生系统有责任确保所有个人平等获得医疗服务，无论其种族、社会经济地位或性别，因此必须查明某些群体获得医疗服务的障碍以及这些障碍对患者参与的影响。

Patients cannot actively engage in the care process if they cannot access basic care needs. Fortunately, organizations can leverage data to identify health inequities, their root causes, and the appropriate interventions to eliminate gaps in care. For example, to start the conversation about health equity, a health system can gather outcomes data by ethnicity (e.g., Latino, white, or African American). With this information, organizations can identify the outcome differentials, then dig deeper to understand the cause of the disparities.

One healthcare organization leveraged an analytics application to collect data abouthealthcare disparitieswithin the system, revealing opportunities to increase patient engagement and, therefore, outcomes. For example, colorectal cancer (CRC) screening data highlighted disparities among non-white, non-English speaking groups. Leaders at the organization used race, ethnicity, and language data, combined with data from the EHR, to understand different causes of the disparities including patients’ religious beliefs and understanding of health practices.

差异发现允许组织更好地参与低CRC筛查水平的患者群体，通过创建针对该群体患者参与障碍的干预措施(例如，语言)。方法包括用当地语言编写的家庭测试包和电话预约提醒。通过定制化的护理方式，患者拥有了参与护理过程和参与护理决策所需的工具。再加上对干预措施有效性的分析洞察，该组织发现目标人群的CRC筛查率提高了3%。

Tactic 3: Prioritize Patient Feedback

With an abundance of data in healthcare, it can be easy for providers to focus on metrics over a patient’s voice. However, the metrics don’t always provide the patient’s feedback about care, a critical piece of patient engagement. Patient feedback is valuable because it allows the patient to be part of the care team and have a voice in care decisions. Although patient commentary is a vital part of keeping patients engaged in their care, many organizations don’t have a way of collecting this information, meaning providers relay feedback anecdotally or don’t at all.

To increase patient engagement, organizations can ensure patients’ voices are heard with programs likePatient Reported Outcomes Measures(PROMs). One health system used PROMs to collect information directly from patients about their care, health education, resources, facilities, and more. This comprehensive information revealed that patient reported information included valuable insight regarding a patient’s quality of life that the initial outcomes data lacked. The health system collects approximately 12,000 PROMs per month across 20 specialties that has led to more honest, frequent discussions between patients and their providers.

Tactic 4: Provide Patient-Centered Education

Care teams can engage patients early in the care process and mitigate the fear and stress of dealing with a new diagnosis by providing effective patient education. Unfortunately, many health systems miss this critical patient engagement opportunity because of inconsistent, misaligned, or outdated patient education programs that lack the data infrastructure to measure the program’s effectiveness. With subject matter expertise and analytics support, organizations can develop an optimal patient education program unique to patient needs and measure the program’s success, increasing patient and family engagement throughout the care continuum.

For example, a children’s hospital in Texas created an interdisciplinary team of experts to evaluate and improve their diabetespatient education program. The analysis revealed opportunities to align pediatric diabetes education with regional and national diabetes standards, tailor education delivery to patient needs instead of using a one-size-fits-all approach, and measure patient education initiatives.

To ensure that every child and their family received the updated diabetes education throughout the care process (and not just at the end), the leadership team integrated patient education into the workflow. With patient education part of the care process, providers could use data to identify which patients have not received diabetes education and work with their care teams to understand why. A comprehensive approach to patient education allowedTexas Children’s Hospitalto standardize its pediatric education program, increase interactions between diabetes educators and patients and their families, and improve overall patient engagement. In the first year of its diabetes engagement campaign, more than 70 percent of Texas Children’s patients with diabetes had at least one visit with a certified diabetes educator.

Patient Engagement Drives Better Outcomes and Customized Care

When patients engage in care decisions, they understand the role they play in the care team and their health, increasing accountability. Health systems can turn patients into partners with access to comprehensive patient data to identify areas in which providers can improve patient engagement. Complete data sets allow healthcare leaders to apply data-informed tactics to improve patient satisfaction and health outcomes. Activating patients throughout the care process not only sets up care interventions for success but also every member of the care team, including the provider, patient, and family.

Additional Reading

你想了解更多关于这个话题吗?Here are some articles we suggest:

1. Three Strategies to Deliver Patient-Centered Care in the Next Normal
2. Shifting to Value-Based Care: Four Strategies Emphasize Agility
3. The Key to Better Healthcare Decision Making
4. Healthcare Process Improvement: Six Strategies for Organizationwide Transformation
5. Healthcare Data Quality: Five Lessons Learned from COVID-19

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