How Patient Engagement helps you achieve Value-Based Care?

As the payment landscape in the healthcare industry is shifting, aligning itself with the Triple Aim of healthcare and the financial aspect of successful outcomes shifting to value-based reimbursements, improving patients’ experience of care and getting them to make right choices about their health is the new focus in the healthcare industry. According to a paper, lack of adherence to medication, which seems like a small step accounts for 10% of total US healthcare costs. Moreover, ensuring adherence and patient engagement is a hard, aggravating task for providers.

Why technological aid is critical to Patient Engagement?

Data is the first thing providers need if they plan on becoming patient-centric. Lately, data has been coming in not only from EHRs, claims, and billings, but also from patient portals, mobile health and wearable technologies. Data comes in from multiple sources in multiple formats, often unstructured, and the lack of a common standard between them adds to the complexities in deriving a meaningful use of it. Apart from this, there are many challenges organizations face:

• Most of the healthcare organizations use a stand-alone data repository, making information sharing across different platforms difficult.
• Sifting through poor quality of data is extremely time-consuming with the unnecessary utilization of resources.
• The insights derived from the data are rarely patient-focused and are more descriptive of operational and financial aspects.
• High-risk patients call for urgent attention, and without good data, there’s no way to identify and prioritize them.

Good Data = Good Care

Patient engagement doesn’t happen to be an easy task and is fundamentally about a systematic, population-focused approach to developing strategies to bring about behavioral change and preventing illness. Having said that, all physicians want to deliver quality care and focus on driving better health outcomes. Access to good data helps them concentrate on what matters the most – improving lives and making healthcare affordable and equitable for all.

Good data can help providers in many ways:

• Meaningful insights: Implementing analytics to gather insights and narrow down to the root of the problems.
• Longitudinal records: Summarizing a patient’s records after accurate analysis and presenting in a way easily accessible to providers.
• Prioritizing patients: Stratifying patients according to their underlying risk factors and assess their health trends.
• Continuous assessment: Monitoring the growth and shortfalls in patient’s health outcomes and helping providers take necessary measures.
• Predictive analysis: Projecting future trends and taking required steps for the patient’s health.

To put it in a nutshell, data, coupled with advanced analytics and dedicated care teams can help in identifying the root of the problems, and ultimately help physicians and health coaches develop specific, tailor-made plans for patients.

Datashop’s Patient Engagement Suite

After closely looking at the perils of poor data quality and tedious manual processes, Datashop was developed as an end-to-end population health management solution that recreates the wheel on patient engagement. Datashop is a population health solution with strategies focused on individuals, requiring minimal manual effort and solving the challenges in patient engagement:

• Patient 360: Datashop aggregates patient data coming in from different sources, cleans and normalizes it, and stores it into a single patient record that gives providers a holistic view of the patient’s entire health and allows them to plan timely interventions.

• Datashop Analyzer: Datashop runs sophisticated analytics on the patients’ health data and pinpoints the anomalies in a patient’s health not only in the present, but also in near future so that providers can learn about their patient’s health and keep up in real-time.

• Datashop portals: Datashop’s patient portals help patients and providers connect on a common platform and monitor the health status in real-time. Caregivers can reach out to patients with alerts about their health, educate them about their health and make them a part of their health decisions.

• Intelligent Care: Employing population health solutions and planning systematic interventions should not require tiresome efforts. Datashop coupled with machine learning algorithms focuses on eliminating manual processes and improving efficiency and wait time.

Patient Engagement an Indicator of Value-Based Care

The Triple Aim of healthcare is unachievable without patients becoming more engaged in the management of their health. According to a survey, more than half of the patients prefer being a part of their health decisions. Moreover, the latest fact sheet released by CMS with patient engagement accounting for 25% of the weight in Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program has led to healthcare organizations work earnestly towards enhancing the patient experience.

In the world of value-based care, patient engagement is less of a task and more of an opportunity. It’s much more than a metric, a mere regulatory requirement; it’s about identifying the gaps in health care delivery, understanding the effects of new care initiatives, developing robust plans to improve patient’s post-episode health, and bringing about an organizational shift towards quality. Value-based care can only be achieved by reaching out to patients and gather actionable insights, and by using data-driven technology, we can open up to meaningful interactions driving better health outcomes.

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