Digital health content should meet patient and provider needs
“We know that patients forget about 40% to 80% of what they hear in those appointments, and so [patient education and follow-up] is critical,” says Mary Olson, RN, Oncology Patient Education Specialist at AHCI.
Allina had its own proprietary patient education content development in place for cancer care, but Loach notes, there were gaps, and filling them required a substantial commitment of time and effort from clinical subject matter experts.
The team aimed to increase their translated materials to better reach non-English-speaking patients. Additionally, ensuring a diverse representation of patient populations in the content was a high priority. UpToDate Patient Engagement offered a robust library of patient-facing educational leaflets and multimedia engagement programs that fulfilled AHCI’s requirements and was able to sequence and deploy through automated triggers or user-friendly, in-workflow selections within Allina’s electronic health record (EHR) and Xealth Digital Care patient-facing app.
“Wolters Kluwer has been a fantastic partner, starting from the very beginning as we were choosing a vendor and asking questions,” Olson says. Wolters Kluwer has been open and responsive to requests for updates or new content development.
Steps to building or refreshing your patient engagement strategy
Loach says that with the tools and content now at their disposal, AHCI has capacity to grow its patient engagement programming.
“We're looking at ways that we can leverage our approach within different specialties or different topics. When I think about where patient education can go, I think the possibilities almost feel endless.”
Loach and Olson agree that there are several key lessons they’ve taken away from AHCI’s successful patient engagement efforts that they would consider essential to a strategic launch:
1. Engage multiple stakeholders upfront
From the very beginning of the vendor selection process, it is valuable to bring in as broad of a team as possible to weigh in on the choice, Olson advises. “We invited everyone who wanted to have a say to come to the table, so then people really had buy-in before we even chose.”
The nearly 30-member selection committee for patient engagement solutions included senior leaders, IT team members, and end users, and Olson notes that they provided transparent reports to the rest of the organization on how they evaluated and narrowed down their vendor and solution options.
2. Create a robust launch and post-go-live team education plan
Engaging your frontline care team members and end users is critical, Loach says. Offering a variety of training options and communication methods helps spread the word about new solutions, as do vendor partner trainers and superuser champions. Communication and engagement needs to continue beyond go-live to maintain utilization. Olson continues to send a monthly user newsletter with patient education updates and celebrations, usage stats, and the ability to reach out to the team with questions and/or suggestions.
3. Consider what you can leverage within your own health system to complement your solution
UpToDate Patient Education provided AHCI the capability to integrate patient-facing materials into workflows for manual ordering and to automate content ordering as desired. Loach says it was important to take advantage of those capabilities within AHCI’s existing EHR and Digital Care application to maximize use and effectiveness of the patient engagement solution. Additionally, leveraging the health system’s custom patient materials in combination with UpToDate offered additional engagement strategies.
