Roughly half of adult population in the United States has at least one chronic illness, with a little more than 40 percent having two or more. Managing heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, hypertension and other chronic conditions account for roughly 90 percent of the more than $4 trillion of the U.S. healthcare expenditure each year.
Helping patients manage chronic conditions through better patient engagement plays a key role in improving outcomes and minimizing the negative cost and health implications associated with chronic disease.
But what does it take to improve patient engagement? One way is through creating a personalized patient experience. For a patient coping with a chronic condition, a personalized experience could mean designing a treatment plan that answers the patient’s questions, helps manage stress, provides education, and empowers the patient as an active participant in their care and overall well-being across the full patient journey.
Personalization and Patient Engagement
Guiding the patient on a personalized care journey drives higher engagement because the experience delivered is relevant to the patient. A health system which leverages a personal understanding of a patient to deliver a consistently relevant experience provides value.
For example, in a National Library of Medicine comparison of personalized vs. generic texts to encourage diabetics to complete routine HbA1c tests, the overall HbA1c completion rate for those receiving a personalized text was double that of those receiving a generic text (22.5 percent to 11.2 percent). Personalization is vital. In a Dynata survey, 38 percent of respondents said they would switch healthcare providers due to a lack of personalization stemming from a lack of a patient understanding.
One challenge for healthcare providers is that the complexity of the patient journey intensifies with the growing trend of the defragmentation of care. With outpatient care, virtual visits, and home health care all on the rise, health systems must be able to connect touchpoints consistently across a greater number of channels to create a holistic care experience.
Building Bridges Across the Care Continuum
The text experiment, even aside from the results, demonstrates that patients have more ways to engage with providers than ever before. The simple act of receiving a text vs. an in-person interaction is a sign of the times. In an Sg2 Analytics 10-year forecast of evaluation and management (E&M) care, in-person visits by existing patients are projected to drop 2 percent, while virtual visits are projected to increase by 26 percent.
In addition to telehealth, patients are also increasingly referred to urgent care facilities, ambulatory centers, and outpatient physical therapy locations. Successful long-term care management requires that healthcare systems engage with patients across a disparate healthcare journey. If a provider recommends physical therapy for knee pain instead of an MRI, for instance, an improved outcome may depend on the provider’s ability to coordinate care and recommend an individualized follow-up treatment plan.
With data readiness in place, health systems can deliver personalized experiences that empower patients, improve quality outcomes, and unify the care journey across every site of care and channel.
In addition to the benefit to the patient, successful long-term care management is also essential in the transition to value-based care (VBC) reimbursement models, which reward providers on outcomes vs. a fee-for-service model. Effective value-based care also relies greatly on creating a personalized patient experience. Healthier outcomes have a lot to do with a patient’s lifestyle, and factors such as diet, exercise, proximity to a gym, access to reliable transportation and other social determinants of health (SDoH) all play roles in promoting long-term health. In a VBC model, providers are incentivized to consider these factors in how to personalize the patient journey.
One Patient, One Story: Enabling Connected Care Through Data
To create sustained, positive behavior change through personalized experiences, a provider needs to have a deep patient understanding. An individualized health care plan that accounts for a patient’s behaviors, digital, medical and claims history, SDoH and other factors across all the ways a patient can access care requires a single patient view.
To generate a unified patient view, health systems must have a single source of truth for patient data. When data is siloed across various sources, health systems are challenged with providing a relevant experience that aligns with the patient journey. If a record from an urgent care visit is not included in a unified patient profile, for instance, that lack of a complete understanding may limit the provider’s ability to recommend the optimal care path.
Having a complete view of the patient through combining all sources of data is essential for guiding a personalized journey, but just as important is the quality of the data. A consistently relevant patient experience requires being able to accurately differentiate one patient from another, and to do so in a way that aligns with the patient journey. When a patient with a chronic condition accesses the patient portal, for instance, a positive experience may depend on instantly showing the patient the right content, e.g., here is information on how to conduct a home HbA1c test, or here is a link to a video that provides instruction on how to use your new insulin pump.
Advancing Patient Engagement Through Data Readiness
To provide a personalized experience that increases patient engagement, data must be complete, accurate, and timely. All relevant data must be collected in the building of a unified patient profile that provides a broad and deep understanding of an individual patient. Furthermore, automated processes need to deal with the inherent messiness of patient data – duplicate identities, misspellings, inaccurate contact information, data entry errors, etc. Timeliness requires that a unified patient profile is updated consistently, as new data is ingested. Continuous, real-time updates are essential for being able to interact with a patient with relevance as the patient journey progresses.
Patient data should also be actionable, trusted, and compliant, which are elements associated with patient data being fit-for-purpose. Making patient data actionable means that it is accessible and marketing-ready in the needed timeframe, e.g., it is structured in a way that every endpoint technology can access it and activate it. A patient portal, for example, is updated in real time.
Ensuring that patient data is trusted means that provider leaders can understand the quality of the data they’re working with – as they are using it – and have the ability to make desired changes that fit with their intended use case. A health system might want tight matching rules when sharing PII, for example, with a looser standard for operational use cases.
Data that is made compliant conforms with not only regulatory requirements such as HIPAA, but also patient preferences for how their data is stored and used.
The process of making sure that patient data is right (complete, accurate, and timely) and fit-for-purpose (actionable, trusted, and compliant) represents the concept of data readiness. Data readiness turns patient data into a valuable asset that enables personalized patient engagement.
Data readiness in action is when a provider marketer, for instance, sends educational materials specific to a patient’s condition or treatment plan in the patient’s preferred channel. It is offering an individualized care management program that accounts for a patient’s social determinants, such as offering a virtual consultation for a patient having difficulty accessing in-person care. It is guiding a holistic patient journey that delivers improved outcomes through a consistently relevant experience and better patient engagement.
With data readiness in place, health systems can deliver personalized experiences that empower patients, improve quality outcomes, and unify the care journey across every site of care and channel.
Discover how Redpoint helps leading health systems orchestrate more connected, patient-centered experiences. -> https://www.redpointglobal.com/healthcare-providers/
