Importance Of Patient Engagement In Health IT

Engagement of patients in health IT is getting more and more important these days. It was always necessary, but now this phenomenon has gained momentum in terms of importance as the modern physicians, medical practitioners as well as healthcare organizations are putting more emphasis on it. This is mainly because their financial success largely depends on the extent of patient involvement in health care IT.

The concept can well be attributed to the importance it carries in today’s context. In fact, there have been a lot of top notch healthcare organizations that have been engaging their patients in health IT. Moreover, the emergence or introduction of new cutting edge technologies backed by the growing influence of more patient-centric approach in the delivery of treatment as well as care is making this phenomenon all the more important.

Let us see how an effective engagement of patients supports health care reforms and improves the expenditure related to treatment along with care.

Statistics say that effective involvement or engagement of patients in health care IT leads to significant cost saving as this enables the right kind of information to be delivered to the people subjected to treatment, thus leading to the much desired transparency in the entire system.

When there is no room for patient engagement, this leads to a gap in communication and patients may end up doing tests along with other stuffs that may not be needed, thereby increasing the cost unnecessarily. However, statistics clearly suggest that whenever people subjected to treatment are communicated with in a proper way regarding their conditions, they can understand and determine various options they have, to counter their medical condition. It is seen that in the majority of these cases, people take the less expensive yet effective paths.

It has also become apparent that the propagation of various internet-based mobile services and the ubiquity of the network connections that are available has made patient engagement in medical IT extremely easier than before and a substantial amount of people are now getting back to the healthcare service providers with valuable feedbacks which is making the task of these service providers easier so far as treating those patients is concerned.

So importance has been conferred to this engagement, that several health care service providers have even introduced mobile applications exclusively designed for patient feedback to ensure more and more patients get actively involved and engaged with the health IT service.

With a view to bridge up whatever communication gap there is between the service providers and the patients, newer technologies are being introduced. However, experts are of the opinion that before a patient actively starts getting engaged the individual at first needs to realize the extent of the effect it will have on the outcome or the diagnosis. Once this happens, then the involvement will be more effective at the end of the day, especially when it comes to treating any particular ailment and improving the relation between the service provider and the patient. After all, the very objectives of involvement of a patient in health IT is to improve the overall health of the patients, along with the relation between the two sides.

As the responsibility of the patients toward treatment costs increases, they have more ground to demand better convenience and more sophisticated solutions of engagement. Patients who do not get optimal satisfaction will have the chance to shift to another health care service provider.

Besides, providers who use various engagement solutions for patients like online portals are more efficient and are in a better position to properly respond to the needs of the patients resulting in better convenience.

Patient engagement in medical IT systems includes various portals that have substantially lowered the indirect as well as direct costs of practices, like mailing the costs for lab results, billing queries resolved via online instead of phone, online scheduling of appointments with doctors or online appointment reminders.

Both private as well as public insurance payers are now shifting to the performance-based reimbursement models when it comes to dealing with health insurance claims. Patient engagement in health care IT is hence extremely important for these value-based models of payment.

You can get in touch with healthcare software development companies for your clinical software development requirement. They can develop healthcare software within allocated budgets and time schedules.

If you would like to hire healthcare software developers, to We develop patient health portal for your healthcare organization, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.

Issues with EHR adoption and its Remedies

Health IT has tremendous potential to empower providers and patients by efficient and effective use of health information. HIT spans a range of technologies – from personal health records, mobile health applications, Patient Portals to Electronic Health Records and Practice Management Systems. Adoption of HIT had a mixed response from both ends. This was driven partly due to inertia against change and partly due to the development and maintenance cost related to software. It final required a push form the government to get things to roll but it was convinced of the benefits the industry was going to draw from its widespread implementation and usage. Monetary incentives were declared by the government for adoption of certified EHRs and upon meeting specific benchmarks, called Meaningful Use. The other major factors which influenced its adoption are a general increase in the society's reliance on information technology federal funding to support purchase of EHR systems and future penalties under the Affordable Care Act for the ones who do not use EHRs. This led to 75 percent of office-based physicians to adopted EHR systems as of 2012. However the concerns continue to exist and the primary ones relate to the cost of purchasing the system and the likely loss of productivity upon its usage. But the major concerns related to adoption of EHR have been the mistakes committed in its usage and its failing to take into account safety of patients.

As a response to numerous complaints which have come from various sources esp. front line providers, the US federal government has implemented a Health IT safety plan. The purpose of this plan is to ensure that only those electronic health records systems are permitted which have the required safety features. Also, the system designs are to be made in such a way that it reduces the chances of occurrence of certain types of common mistakes for e.g. in Computerized Physician Order Entries. All this is expected to result in better care and safety. The main problem however is also the inability to categorically identify the extent to which health IT may have caused or contributed to medical errors. The idea of using a common format is being mooted to allow stakeholders to report on problems. The template suggested provides common definitions that ensure consistency in the manner in which providers report events -in terms of their potential for harm. To enable easy implementation of this initiative the front line staffs are also being extended liability protections to expedite the process of collecting, aggregating and analyzing patient data to which they have access to. Educational materials are also being prepared for public sharing and provisions for trainings identified to ensure that the awareness factor is really high among providers to identify and investigate health IT related adverse events. It will also equip the to take corrective actions and required follow-ups.

In order to improve the use of EHRs and eliminate chances of errors, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has come up with a 10-point recommendation. Gist is as follows:

1. A schedule to be made for working with the private sector to assess the impact of health IT on patient safety.

2. Enable health IT developers to share information about health IT experiences

3. Provision to make public user experiences across vendors

4. Identify criteria to be used for assessing and monitoring the safe use of health IT

5. Make it mandatory for health IT developers to publicly register and list their products with the ONC

6. Health IT developers to be shared the risk management requirements viz-a-viz human factors, safety culture and usability.

7. Make it mandatory for Health IT developers to report health IT related adverse events such as deaths, serious injuries or unsafe conditions

8. Establishment of an independent federal entity for investigating patient safety deaths, serious injuries, or potentially unsafe conditions associated with health IT

9. Appointment of a secretary to monitor and report on health IT safety progress

10. Cross-disciplinary research to be done towards the use of health IT as part of a learning healthcare system

To ensure all this, healthcare software testing has to gear up and test all the facets of a healthcare system, be it patient enrollment or any other system, be it the UI or the performance of the application, be it the security or the layered architecture. That is the only way to reduce the occurrence of medical errors.

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