Top seven considerations for leaders prioritizing patient engagement

2. Turn clinician barriers into opportunities

Addressing barriers your staff encounter will be critical to program success.

A group of seven studies of hospital service improvement assessed barriers to patient engagement. Of 10 barriers identified, the majority were attributable to providers. These included:

• Health professionals lacking knowledge on how to engage with patients who were empowered and asked questions
• A lack of guidance around the role of patients and their involvement
• Beliefs about the representativeness and relevance of individual patient experience
• Professional perceptions about patient capacity to contribute
• Feelings that patients were hostile and ungrateful and that patient feedback was complaining
• Disagreement on the role of patients

Listen to clinician satisfaction and feedback to gauge the severity of provider-centered barriers and identify options in mitigating issues.

3. Consider AI’s impact on a patient engagement program

Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds significant potential for patient engagement, but there are multiple factors to consider.

From automated patient outreach calls and virtual agents to symptom-checking solutions, AI has been useful in educating patients and priming them before they reach out to providers. A study by Becker’s Healthcare and Zoom found that seven out of 10 healthcare leaders report their staff had adopted AI solutions, including wellness and health education, appointment check-in, and patient engagement marketing campaigns. Hesitations around patient satisfaction, bias/hallucinations/malfunctions, and cybersecurity persisted.

Balancing these concerns will require a measured approach to implementing the technology that considers both patient and clinician influence.

4. Work at the health system level

Health system-level patient engagement can be incredibly fruitful, especially as the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic play out in chronic conditions that affect acute care organizations. A full 87% of healthcare leaders responding to a Wolters Kluwer survey reported that patient engagement is “very important to their organization.”

This Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality review of patient and family engagement for managing chronic conditions covers the use of patient advisory councils and patients serving on committees, including a neighborhood clinician partnership in the Navajo Nation focused on improving care for patients with diabetes. Benefits emerged in healthcare processes, development of organizational policies and plans, and tools and education.

Better fiscal outcomes start with a patient activation plan that considers patient engagement at the enterprise level.

5. Study your peers

Patient engagement is specific to your organization, but you’ll find potential for learning by observing other healthcare leaders and institutions. Almost one out of every two healthcare leaders report that they have clear plans to invest in patient engagement within the next 18 months.

A 2023 KLAS survey of almost 100 healthcare executives’ top patient engagement priorities illuminated a range of options for patient engagement in the coming years, including:

• The digital front door experience
• Patient journey optimization
• Physician efficiencies and communications
• Patient education

Approach these perennial opportunities with a goal of activating a better patient experience and enabling your patients as partners in their health outcomes.

6. Leverage patient partnership

Patients are your most valuable asset in improving the consistency and quality of patient-facing content and are a resource you should tap into early in your patient engagement program.

Recruit your patients into planning and decision making, outlining and illuminating health questions, and prioritizing their perspectives throughout your program development process. Look for possibilities across the spectrum of your organizational goals, such as patient engagement in error prevention—patients have long exhibited positive attitudes about supporting safety. Success hinges on the promotion of complex behavioral change and sensitivity of application. Know that patient preference in involvement can vary across factors like medical knowledge, trust in a healthcare team, and satisfaction with their stay at a hospital.

Activating patients as partners requires a personalized approach to the clinician-patient relationship and equipping your clinicians with culturally sensitive digital tools that empower them as key recruiters of patient involvement.

7. Prioritize optimization of the patient experience

Optimizing the hospital patient experience is a relatively new concept, but guidance is available.

Patient engagement at the hospital level yields multiple benefits for clinicians, including a better understanding of patient preferences, insights into the services they need, and seeing issues through a patient lens. Recent research out of Canada reveals that embedding the patient experience throughout the organization is key to achieving these goals.

Effective tools include patient and family advisory councils, standing committees at the clinical unit/department and corporate levels, patient advisors, and patient-inclusive project teams with finite timelines. Research participants also found it useful to employ a collaborative and patient-inclusive approach to creating and editing documents and resources such as websites, procedure consent forms, educational tools, and handouts.

These tactics can be highly effective in creating patient educational materials that balance patient input and alignment with the most recent medical evidence that clinicians are referencing.

Explore the role of digital solutions in robust patient engagement

Smart selection of digital tools is central to generating sustainable patient interest, maximizing resource use, and facilitating access to engagement opportunities. To support the needs of your growing program, look for solutions that feature superior clinical content for both patients and clinicians—maintaining the highest standards of evidence-based information to help patients adhere to their care plans at scale.

Look for patient engagement solutions built to integrate seamlessly with the EHR and other patient-facing technology. These solutions should enable synergies between point-of-care patient needs and enterprise goals—increasing potential for leadership as they work to foster loyalty, improve clinical outcomes in the care community, and meet patients where they are.

Learn more about UpToDate® Patient Engagement Solutions and download the Wolters Kluwer patient engagement survey infographic.