The worldwide patient engagement solutions industry was worth USD 11.97 billion in 2020, and it is predicted to grow at a healthy 16.2% CAGR over the next five years. Some significant elements anticipated to push the revenue market are expected to witness an increasing selection of computerized health records and mobile health devices to improve patient outcomes, integration of favorable government and regulations promoting patient-centric care through hospital management, and the launch of intelligent patient engagement solutions.
Furthermore, patient engagement technologies enable patients to make educated decisions regarding therapeutic options by providing secure and trustworthy communication between patients and physicians. This telehealth solution is also a crucial aspect that is predicted to fuel the market's revenue growth in the future.
Patient engagement in healthcare is a notion that brings together a patient's knowledge, abilities, and capacity to participate in the healthcare decision-making process to enhance the hospital management system and its health outcomes. Patient engagement tools make it easier for healthcare practitioners and cases to cooperate and promote better therapeutic approaches. Patient engagement solutions intend to enhance patient care, decrease ER visits, expand the patient base by turning first-time visitors into long-term patients, and minimize healthcare expenses.
Texts, emails, phone conversations, and patient engagement portals are just a few ways these systems make communication easier. Patient engagement solution has several advantages, including reducing no-shows by sending appointment reminders, building patient satisfaction through surveys and feedback, improving patient compliance, and boosting interaction between healthcare professionals and patients.
Patient engagement solutions use cutting-edge Healthcare informatics-based technologies like AI and IoT to improve the user experience. The growing usage of connected devices to collect important medical data and securely exchange it with doctors has enabled physicians to detect early signs and symptoms of changes in a patient's physical health and general well-being. Other significant drivers projected to contribute to the market's revenue growth include the rising adoption of connected devices, mobile health apps, and the availability of cost-effective patient engagement solutions.
Patient Involvement is defined by six characteristics that form a strong culture of engagement between patients, carers, and health professionals. Each principle and the statement that goes with it isn't meant to be exhaustive; instead, they're meant to start a conversation about the commitments required for meaningful engagement.
Evaluate what all of these principles entail and how you may use them in your patient engagement efforts. They will ensure that all engagement initiatives such as mhealth solutions and EHR are meaningful to all those engaged.
These are the six principles:
Partnership - Effective patient engagement in healthcare necessitates developing genuine, timely, and mutually advantageous connections involving patients, their families, other informal caregivers, health professionals, and the organizations they collaborate with.
Learning - Everyone involved in patient engagement technology should try and learn about each other's viewpoints and perspectives and facts about the situation at hand and how they should improve.
Empowerment - Patients and their caregivers need to feel empowered to openly express their needs, perspectives, and concerns through practice management software without fear of reprisal and make informed decisions confidently.
Transparency - When engaging with patients and caregivers, transparency means that healthcare professionals and organizations are open about their concerns, resource restrictions, and knowledge gaps.
Responsiveness entails that healthcare professionals and organizations respond to the voices of patients, carers, and the general public in ways that reflect the positive influence of their input.
Respect - Health care professionals and organizations show their appreciation for their patient and caregiver partners' time, ideas, lived experiences, varied worldviews, and cultural locales by actively showing signs of gratitude.
Patient engagement also refers to attempts by organizations and government bodies, such as the Department of Health and Long-Term Care, to involve patients in informing system-level policy. Individual advisers incorporated in policy-making teams, patient councils that better represent and seek guidance on handling specific policy difficulties, or internet searches asking for comment on a single policy are examples of practice management, health informatics, and telehealth solutions.
Patient involvement can be relevant among a range of engagement activities such as medical billing solutions, mhealth, remote patient monitoring, and the best method to engagement is determined by the issue and their Patient Engagement goals. All ways are good as long as they are done thoughtfully and in line with best practices, from sharing simple plain language-based information or resources into consulting patients and staying in hospitals on family visitation rules to co-designing a program.
The Patient Engagement Framework depicts a spectrum of patient engagement techniques. These are the following:
Share - This describes how health organizations exchange information that is simple for patients to understand and act on to support personal care decisions and encourage participation in a program, resource, strategy, or conclusion.
Consult - This refers to the methods used by health professionals, organizations, and system planners to gather feedback from sufferers and their carers on a health issue, policy, or decision.
Deliberate refers to how patients and their caregivers discuss a health issue, policy, or choice with health care providers and begin to seek solutions.
Collaborate - Patients and their caregivers, health experts, planners, and organizations work together to discover and implement solutions to a medical condition, policy, or choice.
There is no "one-fit" solution to ensure meaningful and comprehensive patient participation. Depending on the health industry, environment, and geography, the same method may appear and think differently and achieve different results. The key to comprehensive and successful patient engagement is matching the correct method to a worthy scenario at the right time – and often employing more than one approach is contemplated to achieve the desired goal.
According to recent observations, engagement-capable techniques utilize underlying ethics and values, awareness and expertise, infrastructure, and budgeting practices to build successful and comprehensive patient engagement initiatives.
Based on this data, the Patient Engagement Framework identifies four enablers that significantly improve positive engagement to improve patient care quality:
A culture of continuous quality improvement –
Effective patient engagement necessitates a continuing commitment from health organizations and their leaders to improve – and to incorporate the perspectives, viewpoints, and needs of patients and caregivers to provide information about what needs to be improved
Access to health information that is simple to comprehend —
Patient engagement necessitates the involvement of health professionals, organizations, and the healthcare system to provide patients with the opportunity to learn about their health care in a meaningful way. Access to information, as well as broader health policy and strategy health information, is user-friendly.
Cultural competency and a commitment to health equity –
Patients and caregivers must be engaged for health equity, which means that clinicians, planners, and organizations must engage with – and respond to – the specific needs of all patients, especially those from social classes that the health system has long marginalized.
Extensive investigation and analysis –
Examining the process and outcomes of patient engagement can help organizations prove their worth and make a case for engaging patients and caregivers innovatively.
Patient involvement is one of the most valued company features to concentrate on, and the healthcare industry is no exception.
It is difficult to deny that nearly all patients, directly or indirectly, rely on the Internet when selecting healthcare providers.
As a result, the following are some of the advantages of patient engagement:
Enhanced Patient Inflow- Patient inflow increases quickly due to the improved provider-receiver relationship created by patient engagement.
Improved Competition- The healthcare business as a whole is under intense peer pressure, and more extraordinary patient engagement strategies, as well as marketing efforts, will always keep you on your toes.
Reduced Costs- When you have a steady stream of patients, you can concentrate on using productive yet cost-effective marketing techniques to keep the flow going.
Patient Satisfaction- Another critical part of healthcare delivery is patient satisfaction. Better patient engagement always puts the patient first, allowing for a more engaging relationship with healthcare recipients.
Cloud-based patient engagement strategies have emerged as a result of the digital world to support this procedure technologically and electronically – and we feel that the connectivity provided by these platforms has never been more crucial than in 2020 and 2021.
Hospitals can leverage a few patient-centered tactics listed below to implement effective computerized patient engagement frameworks.
Make a strategy for engagement :
The first stage in developing a successful patient engagement strategy is to identify the patient demands that must be satisfied and the areas where support is needed to help patients prepare for medical procedures and monitor their recovery.
Cloud-based patient engagement, health screenings, dietary or medication monitoring, planned checkups, and emotional support are standard patient engagement tools in this setting. Incorporating these into an engagement plan may provide patients with a more comprehensive and actionable support system.
Electronically implementing the engagement plan can aid in the healthcare automation of the patient engagement strategy and the optimization of content delivery to patients.
Simplify the language:
It's critical to remove the fear aspect from patient participation. Because of the language's lack of accessibility, much of the jargon used by medical practitioners can leave patients feeling befuddled or even afraid.
When engaging with online media, it's essential to explain patient engagement tools in simple terms, as some patients may already struggle with technology. Patient experience and user usability are critical factors to consider when selecting a patient interaction platform. You might not obtain the total value of your hospital's selected platform if your patients forsake it.
Define the consequences for various clinical conditions:
Varied patients will have different requirements, particularly after surgery. Due to more complex postoperative needs, certain patients may require more self-care education than others. In contrast, patients who are emotionally stressed before surgery may require additional soft support tools such as daily encouragement reminders.
Patients who rely on family or live-in help may also require their digital involvement to include tools for caregivers. Because patients will need a clear standard of recovery to reach, results and therapy should be based on tracking a patient's progress toward their personal recovery goals. To reach results and therapy, clear recovery standards should track a patient's progress toward their personal recovery goals.
Create accessible resources for patients:
It can combine Automated activities with information and advice to improve engagement. It's one thing to utilize digital platforms to ping pop-up messages on a patient's mobile device. Still, when these notifications explain why the chores are necessary and information on how they benefit, patients are more likely to follow them.
Historically, this would have been part of a healthcare practitioner's job during in-person checkups, but putting these materials on digital platforms provides patients access to the 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and allows them to be used as prompts for automatic reminders.
Enhanced Post-Surgery Care:
Post Surgery Care is an integral aspect of a multidisciplinary, evidence-based culture of care that puts the patient's requirements at the core of its systems. As a result, it has been assured that protocols to improve early mobilization following surgery, such as postoperative and wound care guidelines, pain-scale assessments, and electronic patient-reported findings and experiences gathering, should be included in the software.
Remote Patient Monitoring:
Despite the global pandemic requiring regional, state, and even national lockdowns, patient accessibility has never been more critical. Patients are currently one of society's most vulnerable groups.
Remote patient monitoring helps in patient's preparedness and recovery while keeping safe social distance rules aids both the patient and hospitals deal with a critical mass of new cases requiring in-person emergency intervention.
CONCLUSION:
The most evidence-based patient and family engagement interventions are for self-management support for persons with chronic diseases. A promising method is to use technology to facilitate patient and family interaction. Only a few research studies have looked into advanced care planning or interventions for people with multiple chronic illnesses. More research is needed to fill a significant evidence gap on patient and family engagement at the healthcare system, community, and policy levels.
The conceptual, analytical, and methodological frameworks used in future research should be more consistent. A procedural review that analyses group composition, group cohesiveness or collaboration, equality of participation, and level of deliberation/reasoning is also required. In the realm of deliberative democracy, such assessments are being created, and they could be helpful in patient involvement programs.
Considering the intention of these services to be patient-centered, the minimal evaluation of patients' experiences is particularly problematic. Further evaluative criteria should be devised to assess patients' experiences.
Since causal linkages between patient engagement and health outcomes are difficult to establish, future research should include longitudinal metrics and methodologies to investigate the impact of patient co-design on treatment quality.