EHRs must become more instinctive to help patient engagement

As more contributors move to accountable care and population health compensation arrangements, several realize the significance of improving attempts to engage sufferers in their care.

While understanding that engagement attempts will be important to support changing reimbursement methodologies, these new attempts so far have been perplexing to execute, claims Nick van Terheyden, MD, chief medical officer at Dell Healthcare & Life Sciences.

Part of the reason is that data technology in utilization by contributors has been constructed to automate routine transactions and present useful data and services, but does not always meet that aims, he elaborates.

Physicians were asserted under the federal meaningful use program to execute electronic health records (EHRs) to store sufferer data, but EHRs in large part haven’t saved prices, Terheyden emphasizes. Nor have EHRs become instinctive and give to physicians services they and everyone else can get on their smartphones, van Terheyden considers.

Smartphones provide the potential to give intelligence that offers insights without disruption to workflows, and that is what EHRs require to do, he adds. One way to make better the workflow and intuitiveness of EHRs could be utilization of technology like Amazon’s voice-command Echo Alexa smart home appliance that has Wi-Fi and streaming music, and can be served as a personal digital assistant.

Technology like that given by Echo Alexa delivers relevant insights at the correct time to the right user, van Terheyden claims, and EHRs require doing that—like automatically informing a physician at the point of care that the sufferer hasn’t had a tetanus shot in ten years. This kind of technology also can make better the patient and physician engagement and foster better results, in accordance to van Terheyden.

Right now, engagement is proposed to foster better results, but in huge measure is not yet doing so, he asserts. “You go observe the doctor who tells you what to do and you do it, but that is not engagement. That is simply consumption and I am not certain if that is the best selection for me and my situations and preferences.”

In short, sufferers may be following instructions, but not taking extra steps to acquire optimal results. Physicians, Terheyden claims, require a more interactive access to patient engagement; they can advise the requirement to decrease the calories and exercise more, but that generally doesn’t equate with a reduction in weight. What is needed is a change not merely in sufferer behavior, but physician behavior as well.

While sufferer engagement might not be optimal much of the time, there is an increasing subset of sufferers who do research on their own. They are inquiring what the physician advises and maybe even know more about a specific medical condition than the physician, van Terheyden claims. “We doctors have to come to the realization that we are not always the smartest personality in the room anymore. Sufferers require being their own primary care manager, and physicians have to admit it.”

With technology like that employed by Echo Alexa, a physician could generally inquire the EHR for the last time a sufferer had a CAT scan or another process. And if a red dot can occur on your phone demonstrating a message, the EHR could reflect a red dot indicating that a lab outcome is now available.