Today’s patients are becoming savvy healthcare consumers, looking for more options for convenience, better price, or more personalized care to meet their specific wants or needs.
Hospitals and health systems are keenly aware of the need to adapt strategies related to patient engagement to meet modern patient expectations. According to Wolters Kluwer’s 2025 Future Ready Healthcare Report:
- 70% of healthcare organizations say they recognize the need to respond to the changing needs of patients.
- 64% are also anticipating heightened expectations from organizational leadership to produce measurable results.
For many healthcare organizations, the first step is to begin viewing patients as active members of the care team and integrating them more into the decision-making process, with a goal toward empowering patients with more evidence and information about their conditions and treatment plans.
How do you turn patients into partners?
While healthcare has long understood the value of patient engagement, developing patient partnerships requires a different approach.
The World Health Organization (WHO) patients-as-partners initiative aimed to better understand how patient involvement in their own care could help reduce adverse events. The study also noted that patients-as-partners needed to be trained to understand their role in being more proactively involved with their health professionals, and professionals require training to include the patient’s perspective.
A more generally applicable patient partnership maturity model looks at engagement strategies and using technology to build consistent, authentic, and increasingly more involved relationships with patients.
Consumerism’s impact on patient engagement and decision-making
Consumers are spending more than ever on health and wellness – U.S. consumers are estimated to spend nearly $1 trillion when combining out-of-pockets healthcare costs with personal wellness expenses.
According to data from the 2022 and 2023 McKinsey Consumer Health Insights Surveys:
- 44% of healthcare consumers research providers before making an appointment.
- 58% of U.S. consumers surveyed say they prioritize their health more now than a year ago.
Survey data reveals that consumers are looking for affordable, convenient healthcare offerings, as one might expect. But they also prize healthcare organizations and providers that demonstrate high quality, show they respond to consumer feedback, and offer omnichannel care options, such as initial virtual care visits with in-person follow-ups.
Empowering patients as part of a unified UpToDate solution
Engaging patients as care team members is only one of many complex considerations modern healthcare systems have to manage. With so many care teams, strategic decision-makers, and technology partners working toward interconnected goals that affect patients, it is important for health systems to find ways to unify whenever and wherever they can.
That’s the guiding principle behind UpToDate® Enterprise Edition, a solution that aligns modern health systems through expanded capabilities and a unified approach to clinical decision-making. In addition to extensive clinical decision support tools, advanced analytics, and streamlined core processes, UpToDate Enterprise Edition now provides seamless access to award-winning UpToDate patient education content directly within the Epic electronic health record (EHR) and MyChart patient portal to help health systems build their patient partnership initiatives.
eBook: Patient collaboration and advancing innovation
As health systems face competing challenges, actively engaging the patient as part of the care team can enable a new, innovative era. With this reframed idea of the patient as part of the care team, leaders can take a step back and revisit current systems related to the patient care journey and experience for optimization opportunities. Patient engagement and education strategies can be a systemic way to support patients with information that engages them and supports plan adherence. Learn more in our new eBook, “Patient collaboration can break down barriers and advance innovation.”
