One of the "five pillars" of meaningful use is to engage patients and their families in electronic health data. But engaging patients and families with electronic health data isn't just about HITECH requirements and stimulus money - - it's also a way to foster collaborative decision-making between provider and patient, which, in turn, improves the patient experience, leads to better outcomes, and can reduce readmissions.
Americans pay more attention and become more engaged in their health and medical care when they have easy access to their health information online, according to a 2010 California HealthCare Foundation survey. For example, patients who use a personal health record say they take steps to improve their own health, know more about their healthcare, and ask their doctors questions they say they would not otherwise have asked.
But consumer adoption is still low—just 7%, according to the survey. The questions facing the healthcare industry are how best to get those numbers up and whose job it is to do so.
"We need to find better ways to tap into the skills of the consumer. There's hardly anyone more motivated to manage their own health or that of a family member," says Donna DuLong, RN, cochair of the American Health Information Management Association's Personal Health Information Practice Council. "The trick is finding the right tools and helping educate them and raise awareness."
Here are five ways to engage patients in their personal health records:
1. Address privacy concerns. About 75% of the people currently not using a PHR who responded to the CHCF survey call it "a significant barrier" to participation. Providers should stress that electronic data is more secure than paper charts, which might be lying out on a desk where anyone can see them instead of behind a firewall in a password-protected computer.
2. Use patient-centered design principles. To engage patients in online health records, make access and navigation as easy as possible. Arrange data in ways that make sense to a layperson—organizing content by condition, for example, rather than by date of service.
3. Offer familiar services. Patients who do any kind of online business—from banking to shopping (and, really, who doesn't?) will feel comfortable with healthcare services such as online appointment scheduling, appointment reminders, and medication refill requests.
4. Reach out to digital natives. Interactive and relevant content is important to tech-savvy consumers, so build communities and create intelligent tools and searches for them. "Engagement matters," DuLong says.
5. Reach patients through a trusted source. People trust their personal docs—and so it should fall primarily to the primary care physician to "sell" patients on the idea of personal health records. "We need physicians and patients to start talking about how these tools can improve their communication and assist patients to be more in control of their own health," says Sam Carp, CHCF vice president of programs. Quick access to lab tests and results is a big selling point for patients, says vice president and chief innovation and technology officer at the Palo Alto (CA) Medical Foundation, part of the Sutter Health System.
Meanwhile, if the healthcare industry will be looking to docs to get patients engaged in personal health records, that means docs must also be on board. Busy doctors—or those who are reluctant adopters—need an incentive to do so, whether through government incentives or penalties for failing to embrace electronic health records. "The more successful the current federal effort is to promote EHR adoption among physicians and other providers, the easier it will be for patients to access their health information from their most trusted source," says Mark D. Smith, MD, CHCF president and CEO.
Read more about patient and physician engagement in the January HealthLeaders magazine article, Meaningful Use Means Engaging Patients in EHR, Too.