The Difference Between Patient Interaction and Patient Engagement: Meeting Patients Where They Are
Deeply engaging patients in their care to improve care delivery and health outcomes is a universal, but elusive, goal across the clinician community. Several reasons contribute to this unfulfilled goal, including lack of a patient-centric approach, inadequate and outdated resources and tools, and misaligned incentives. Solving these three obstacles may significantly improve patients’ experience and clinical outcomes. Memora Health has enabled health systems to accomplish this goal with flexible, patient-centric digital tools that intelligently scale the reach of the care team beyond the four walls of healthcare. In this post, we will outline three essential pillars that are necessary to convert fragmented patient interaction into true, scalable patient engagement.
Pillar 1: Patient-Centric Approach to Meet Patients Where They Are
Patient engagement refers to a sustained effort by health care organizations to promote positive patient behavior and health outcomes along with a patient’s knowledge, ability, and willingness to manage their health. As motivational interviewing techniques have shown, meeting patients where they are enables more effective engagement. A growing body of research shows that patients who are more actively involved in their health care, through increased literacy, communication, autonomy, and decision making, experience better outcomes at lower costs. For example, patients with higher Patient Activation Scores have been shown to have a 20% reduction in projected health care costs in the next six months following engagement interventions relative to patients with lower scores.
A patient-centric approach to engagement includes several components that need to be delivered in an easy-to-use way and include, among others, the ability for patients to:
- Choose a preferred method of communication
- Select their language option of choice
- Receive outreach that is personalized based on patient responses and needs
- Identify social support gaps that prevent them from realizing their health goals, such as transportation, peer support, or food assistance
- Create personalized health goals
Memora Health has successfully met these specific engagement needs of over 50 health systems.
By offering four different communication channels (SMS text, email, IVR, and WhatsApp), which do not count against patients’ data plans or cell phone minutes, and 109 different language options, Memora creates easy, proactive ways to engage and communicate with patients. Memora uses an interactive engagement platform that can convert unstructured patient-reported data into structured pathways that can be mapped and actioned through proprietary natural language processing technology. This keeps the patient experience on the front-end easy, simple, and conversational. Through this approach, Memora creates a responsive, personalized, and differentiated patient experience using a virtual care assistant. Memora Health has shown clinically validated metrics: a >90% patient activation rate and a >74% 60-day sustained patient engagement rate.
Pillar 2: Intelligent Tools that Reduce Clinician Burden
A patient-centered approach is the foundation for effective patient engagement. Yet, most engagement tools overburden clinicians and subsequently fail to prove beneficial for care teams or their patients. The uptake of traditional patient portals as a way to drive patient engagement and communication has been limited. While over 90% of clinician organizations offer a patient portal, fewer than 20% of patients activate and use them. Portals are often cumbersome and difficult to navigate. It is, therefore, not surprising that engagement initiatives delivered through portals have failed to deliver sweeping success. Many existing solutions add clinician burden and administrative work simply to manage and coordinate appropriate outreach to patients, making their utility impractical at best and counterproductive at worst.
In contrast, intelligent engagement solutions, like Memora Health’s platform, can significantly accelerate effective and sustained outpatient care. Memora maps clinical pathways to outreach touchpoints, which allows patients to access information and resources easily via their cell phones. Low-touch interfaces (e.g. SMS, email) are much easier to access for patients and effectively “prescribe” care pathways and outpatient interventions on behalf of care teams. The system integrates with EMRs, CRMs, access center systems, and other solutions to make any patient experience and engagement strategy both seamless and dynamic.
Patients at lower risk for complications may be assigned to an automated pathway in which they receive basic reminder messaging and information as a way to manage their condition. As patients report worsening symptoms or specific problems, these concerns can be dynamically triaged to the clinical team to automatically move patients to a higher touch engagement approach.
Clinicians are no longer overwhelmed with “noisy” alerts that may not be clinically relevant and can instead focus on the clinical escalations that need clinician-driven interventions. Memora has shown a 64% reduction in clinical messages allowing clinicians to more effectively focus on patients who need their guidance. Memora has an average 94% clinician satisfaction rating, a strong indicator of how embedding intelligent platforms into the current standard of care delivery can be tremendously valuable.
In the below engagement example at one of our client health systems, Memora uses intelligently-timed, patient-centered check-ins based on a patient’s assigned clinical pathway to facilitate navigation during the postpartum period and drive higher engagement via two-way communication with patients.
Pillar 3: Aligned Incentives to Sustain Patient Engagement Initiatives
Traditionally, patient engagement was neither prioritized nor rewarded efforts within health care organizations. Overcoming this misalignment is the third pillar in scaling the reach of traditional care delivery models.
Clinician incentives, including value-based care arrangements, are causing shifts in focus to improving patient engagement. Federal pay-for-performance programs like the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), Meaningful Use, and health care organization ratings like the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores make the need for effective engagement solutions and greater alignment around long-term patient growth strategies a top priority for ongoing financial success.
To ensure success, scalable digital solutions are required that enable ongoing patient follow-up outside of clinic visits to ensure patients are both managed well and will return for needed, ongoing care. Deploying automated, patient-centered outreach enables operational scale while at the same time increasing the overall level of patient engagement. Memora has co-developed and deployed automated engagement approaches, across leading academic medical centers, that provide leading indicators of quality scores (i.e. HCAHPS, Stars) while also driving retention and added reimbursement by using NLP to process patient-reported data. To further enable success, Memora’s solution functions as an extension of clinicians and helps to facilitate coordination and centralization leading to better team-based care for higher performance. As a result, these health systems have seen a more than 6-fold increase in the patient reach rate and >26% increase in patient satisfaction.
Moving In a More Patient-Centric Direction
Meeting patients where they are and making all patient touchpoints both smarter and scalable will quickly become table stakes for effective patient care. It’s important for organizations to not just provide their patients with additional resources, but to rather think more fundamentally about delivering a unified, cohesive experience that simplifies how patients and clinicians are able to access and navigate care delivery.
Memora Health collaborates with clinical teams to align customized patient interactions to care pathways that include specific outreach points. As patients’ needs change, the frequency and type of interactions can be automatically increased or decreased while keeping patients engaged and activated. For health systems, this approach creates a unified view into all patient interactions and helps identify potential care gaps to anticipate areas of patient need proactively.
To learn more about how Memora Health scales intelligent, patient-centered engagement, please contact us at info@memorahealth.com.
Memora Health is building the operating system for care delivery that implements intelligent, streamlined workflows and revolutionizes the patient experience outside the care setting. We offer a smart end-to-end platform that unifies fragmented health care data to enable providers, payors, and life science companies to automate care delivery operations — from patient communication to documentation to reimbursement. We uniquely use artificial intelligence to digitize existing care delivery workflows, giving clinicians infrastructure that learns from every encounter they have. Memora supports a full suite of virtual care systems from automated patient intake and scheduling to remote monitoring and care pathways to billing and documentation. Memora is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Kevin Durant, Martin Ventures, and several healthcare strategic groups.
