Guest Post: Is There a Business Case for Engaging Patients?
The AMA recently published an article questioning the merits of patient portals — the primary tool for engaging patients. Rob Tennant, senior policy adviser with the MGMA-ACMPE, the entity formed by the merger of the Medical Group Management Association and the American College of Medical Practice Executives raised the fundamental issue: “The business case just hasn’t been made.” I’ll attempt to make it.
Perhaps the best evidence of the business case is when industry visionaries/organizations/leaders such as HIMSS (the professional association for healthIT), Aetna and Kaiser Permanente have made significant investments in patient engagement. Many have called 2013 the “Year of Patient Engagement” as it represents it hitting the mainstream healthcare provider community including HIMSS commissioning a book on patient engagement that executives/leaders from Aetna (Jan Oldenburg), HIMSS (Brad Tritle), Kaiser Permanente (Kate Christensen, MD) and myself wrote and edited. Further, the organizations that have demonstrated the most impressive Triple Aim results have patient engagement as a centerpiece of their groundbreaking Direct Primary Care Medical Home (DPC – Direct Primary Care, for short) model outlined in Health Insurance’s $4.4 Billion Bunker Buster. If you would like to be notified when the seminal paper on Direct Primary Care or the Patient Engagement book is published, please contact me via my LinkedIn profile - http://www.linkedin.com/in/chasedave.
I’ve excerpted a couple sections of Pam Dolan’s article to set context and then I will address the business case. The patient portal benefits assume that it’s more than a simplistic silo’ed patient portal tethered to an EHR since they are broadly available. [Disclosure: My company, Avado, is one many patient engagement companies.] This is why I would call it the patient portal & relationship management system or simply patient relationship management system to distinguish it from traditional limited patient portals.
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Dave Chase is the CEO of Patient Relationship Management company, Avado, that provides basic & advanced patient portals for healthcare providers in accountable models such as medical/health homes, accountable organizations, etc.. A Senior Consultant in Accenture's Healthcare Practice prior to founding Microsoft's Health platform business transforming it from Microsoft's worst vertical market to its strongest (in terms of 3rd party developer support & revenue). He left Microsoft in 2003 to follow his passion to work in startups as an executive to multiple high growth companies. Avado has been featured in the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Washington Post and numerous healthcare industry publications. Avado was also a finalist in the world's most competitive startup competition -- TechCrunch Disrupt. Chase has been named one of the 10 most influential people in healthIT (and the only vendor in the top 50). He's also part of the StartUp Health academy selected as one of the "healthcare transformers".
