Your patients want to be a member of their own care team. They’re ready to be equipped to take informed actions and make good decisions about their care. Empowering them takes a system that’s built to engage patients through personalized communication, digital tools, and evidence-based technologies.
Care teams at many organizations struggle with fragmented systems—navigating roadblocks to funding, adoption gaps that vary across patient groups, and solutions that don’t match patient engagement preferences. The result is a missed opportunity to create meaningful patient partnerships and a loss of opportunities to create success with aligned, evidence-based content.
With the right strategy, these health leaders can realize a future where patients are equipped to take more meaningful action to improve health outcomes and adhere to treatment plans.
Reimagine patient engagement to empower care team success
Your patients don’t want to have healthcare happen to them. They want to be active partners with your clinical and administrative teams. For this to be successful, patients need access to the same evidence your clinicians are referencing—in the form of personalized patient educational content that meets them where they are.
This kind of educational content can improve patient outcomes and their overall health, save them an anxiety-inducing trip to social media, and support self-care and adherence. When care teams and patients are on the same page, alignment can even enhance the productivity of your clinicians and internal care teams.
Patient portals and electronic health records (EHRs) enhanced with this kind of content help unify systems and improve adoption among your clinicians. Unified solutions that integrate content into workflows and prioritize consistency can take the weight off team members and roles that are already experiencing high rates of burnout.
Consider these strategies to welcome the patient into the care team
Effectively engaging your patients starts at the strategic level. Your strategies should take inspiration from team-based care models, connecting the care team across disparate touchpoints. At the system level, look for opportunities to:
- Integrate consistent evidence-based information across care teams and patients.
- Implement solutions that align and integrate workflows.
- Empower patients as key players in preventive care initiatives.
- Leverage analytics across the enterprise and beyond.
- Harness the power of partnerships with your community and other ecosystem members.
As members of the care team, patients will have their own needs and preferences. Today’s patients are used to seamless, personalized interactions—they don’t have to wait or create workarounds with their banks or when shopping online. This is why real-time insights are a critical tool for your strategy.
Technology that prioritizes real-time connection, collaboration, and shared decision making that acknowledges personal preferences is central to a positive experience for your patients—it’s foundational to balancing efficiency with empathy and engaging patients as influencers of their own health outcomes. This class of technology can even help improve provider performance.
Empower patients to relieve your providers and enhance value
When leadership gives patients tools and information that help them take responsibility for their health, they can be a real asset to your providers. Administrative burden is the biggest contributor to clinician burnout. Technologies that help providers empathetically engage are a value-add for both them and their patients.
Digital content bundles
Look for areas to turn proprietary educational content into easily-accessible resources for your patients. Keep your education fresh with the latest clinical and drug information that meets rigorous academic standards to make digital education a standardized part of your patient experience.
Video-based educational content
Videos can be a powerful and familiar channel for personalized patient education. Younger generations especially prefer video learning.
Video-based educational content can expand patient engagement and improve it across the entire patient journey. From admission to discharge, video can be used to leverage multi-lingual features, visuals, and coordinate with print materials and clinician instructions to create a personalized and customized patient experience.
Joining a future of patient-centered partnerships
Reimagining a care team that welcomes patients into collaborative care models can encourage a new level of creative thinking from your leadership on multiple fronts.
Look for established trusted vendor partners that prioritize communication and engagement that easily falls into rhythm with the evidence-based approach that your frontline care teams and end users are employing. Patient-centered care teams thrive when partners are as focused on high-quality patient content and education as you are.
