Patient Self-Management

A collection of 13  Posts

Shahid’s No BS guide to patient engagement at #HIMSS15

I’ll be at #HIMSS15 in Chicago this week and am preparing for the onslaught of the term “patient engagement”. It’s both overused and ill-defined which means it’s almost meaningless as a category of technology or approaches. It’s also multi-faceted which means a definition is not going to be forthcoming soon; so, I’m not going to try. As I go through the educational sessions and exhibits looking at patient engagement solutions, I’m going to be trying to figure out how to categorize them.

Much has been made of the push to better engage patients, but little has been spent on examining exactly what patients want. Despite the requirements set by the EHR Incentive Program, simply deploying a patient portal isn’t enough to engender real, sustainable engagement. Recently TechnologyAdvice surveyed 409 adult Americans about their digital health services preferences. I really like the surveys they run so I reached out to Zach Watson, the healthcare IT content manager at TechnologyAdvice, to see what health providers, entrepreneurs, and innovators could learn from the results.

Given the number of breaches we’ve seen this Summer at healthcare institutions, I’ve just spent a ton of time recently on several engineering engagements looking at “HIPAA compliant” encryption (HIPAA compliance is in quotes since it’s generally meaningless). Since I’ve heard a number of developers say “we’re HIPAA compliant because we encrypt our data” I wanted to take a moment to unbundle that statement and make sure we all understand what that means.

The push towards shifting the patient’s role from a passive recipient of care to an active member of the care-team looks set to gain further legislative backing. Earlier this year, the Health IT Standards Committee, along with The Joint Commission and ONC, laid out recommendations for integrating patient generated health data (PGHD) into Stage 3 Meaningful Use requirements. To see what this might mean to health IT and med tech vendors, I reached out to Zach Watson of TechnologyAdvice, who covers EHR related news, along with business intelligence, and other topics.

I recently participated in a wonderful 55 minute video interview conducted by Nirav Desai for his_ **Hands On TeleHealth Interview **show_. I wanted to thank Nirav for leading an insightful discussion; you can watch the video on Nirav’s site but I wanted to capture the essence of the interview in the transcription below. Nirav: What are the essentials of Telehealth and Telemedicine? Shahid: Telehealth and Telemedicine are about extending health care from physical institutions, where it has most recently resided, to where the patients can receive care at home or other more convenient locations.

Today’s reality of patient management is “disjointed care” and most of the collaborators in a patient’s care team don’t know what each other is doing for the patient in real time. Knowing all the different participants in the patient’s care team (providers, payers, family members, etc.) and coordinating and integrating their electronic activities is what successful EHRs must handle with ease as they look to graduate from basic retrospective documentation systems to modern patient collaboration platforms.

I was recently interviewed for a nice article on why and how private physician practices should push for new technologies. Andrea Downing Peck did a pretty good job putting together a collage of views from me and some of my well known colleagues online: Mary Pat Whaley, David Henriksen, Dr. Jaan Sidorov, Shari Crooker, Rosemarie Nelson, David Harvey, David Williams. Here are some of my favorite quotes (taken directly from the article):

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