‘Simply… Engage the Patients’
A couple of weeks ago I was in Boston to attend the 2009 Connected Health Symposium. Despite the restrictions on folks travel budgets, attendance was larger than last year, with more than 1000 healthcare industry attendees, and much of the conversation—unsurprisingly—was about the uncertainty regarding upcoming healthcare reform.
But while healthcare reform provided a common thread of uncertainty, there were two major themes that surfaced, on which almost everyone agreed. Those themes continued to come up in both the presentations I attended, as well as my hallway conversations:
1. It’s all about patient engagement
2. Simplicity is the key to success
Clearly, these two themes have been part of the Pharos Innovations approach and business model from the beginning. I found it gratifying that others in our industry, including payers and industry thought leaders concurred.
It’s all about patient engagement
Conference attendees and presenters have been talking about the importance of engaging members/patients in health management programs for a long time. But for the first time, I heard a large number of payers discussing the importance of overall member/patient engagement and the importance of programs that facilitate such engagement. The discussions focused less on individual health and wellness programs and more on overall engagement in health and in healthy behaviors.
Patient engagement and patient self-care is becoming a hotter topic these days, and was the subject of a recent American Heart Association (AHA) scientific statement, Promoting Self-Care in Persons With Heart Failure. This AHA statement also acknowledged that care coordination and tele-health hold promise for improving the self-care abilities of persons with HF and provided evidence-based recommendations for clinicians to promote self-care in their patients. (I’ll cover the AHA statement in a subsequent blog post).
Simplicity is the key to success
The second prevalent theme at the 2009 Connected Health Symposium was “simplicity is the key to success.” It is more apparent than ever to me and other industry leaders that it isn’t about technology for the sake of technology, but the process of care coordination and the results and impact that technology delivers. Bottomline: are patients healthier and is money being saved? I am proud to say that we at Pharos couldn’t agree more and actually built our model around that very same belief.
One very instructive and informative session that I attended was titled “New Directions for Self-Insured Firms in the Purchase of Health and Wellness Services.”
Panel members from both Partners and BCBSMA strongly opined that health and wellness programs themselves are not as important as patient engagement. The employers noted that their current focus is: the bottom line, retention and productivity. However, they also shared that they measure value through engagement, intermediate outcomes (are behaviors beginning to change?) and hard fiscal outcomes (claims reductions and improvements in productivity).
This is where the connection comes back to us at Pharos Innovations. Tel-Assurance® is a simple, scalable solution that has shown dramatic cost-savings and significant clinical improvement—regardless of geography or populations served—because our participants are engaged in their own healthcare. We’ve been saying simplicity in delivery and patient engagement are the keys to success since our inception in 1995.
And it was great to hear that so many others in our industry are starting to think so too.
