Technology Boosts Patient Engagement
Today many doctors are using technology to improve patient engagement. This in fact means involving the patient in his or her own care. Most doctors and healthcare professionals have realized that involving the patient is leading to improved health, patient satisfaction and reduced costs. Thus better outcome for all the parties involved. It also helps to improve productivity for the practice. In addition, technology is being used for the purpose.
Patient Engagement
When the patients are active participants in their own health plan, they receive quality and safer care without errors. Most patients are careless in taking their medications. They do not adhere to the prescribed treatment and discontinue the medication once they seem to feel a little better. A true patient engagement would involve following the actual treatment protocol. This also makes it easier for better patient partnership in decision making.
Use Of Technology
Smart Phones
The technological advancement in communication can be adapted to boost patient engagement in healthcare industry. Today people are very savvy with the use of mobile phones and tablets or computers. It is a safe repository and communication tool that can be used for sending or receiving reminders for precautionary or follow-up care, receiving patient questions and requests, scheduling or changing appointments, sending patients education materials, etc. The lab tests result scan be received online and can be shared with doctors without having to make multiple visits to the lab.
EHR’s
The EHR or electronic health records can be leveraged properly so that doctors have a better interaction with patients in the examination room. Radiology, laboratory, and medical devices are internally interfaced with the EHR of the patient. It also allows the doctor to import results of the examination into the patient’s portal that can be checked by the patient anytime.
Saves Examination Time
Visual display of data in the examination rooms by the doctor helps the patient in understanding his health better. Medical history, scanned images, BMI graphs, prescriptions etc can be checked at one portal. It also helps to keep track of his improving health. The doctor too saves a great amount of time while examination as he has each patient record and information at his touch. It decreases chances of misplaced or lost medical record papers, medical history, and prescriptions.
Technology and education thus involves the patient himself in decision making regarding his health problems rather than just the physician taking the decision. They are now provided with the option of choosing the treatment based on their perspective and unique values. Today patients make use of smart phones and wearable to proactively manage their health in a comparatively better way. These devices track the overall patient’s physical activities and their symptoms and record them. It can be incorporated into EHR for better evaluation.
The use of technology helps to instill efficiency and effectiveness in workplace. It helps to boost up profitability of the practice. Improved engagement is seeing results in many healthcare facilities by reducing overall healthcare costs. Today more and more hospitals and health care facilities are adopting a wide range of technology and communication tools to keep track of patient’s information and communicate with them, with the motive of increasing patient engagement.