At least, that’s the scene painted in a recent post by Dr. Danielle Ofri on the New York Times’ Well Blog. In the piece, Dr. Ofri mourns the ‘loss of intimacy’ in the exam room now that there are computers there. She does spend a few sentences lauding the strides that medicine is taking now that its world is digital. But she ends her piece celebrating the last doctors in her organization that fail to write up their notes in digital charts. For her, these moments where she has to go back to the patient and ask them questions they’ve already answered are ‘lucky’ opportunities for a face to face chat.

Our Take: Dr. Ofri is clearly experiencing a real loss of contact with her patients. But here at Engaging the Patient, we don’t feel this is the way things must be. Dr. Ofri is feeling the pinch of a choice that is simply unneeded. It is not either use computers or engage patients. There are a dozen ways computers and technology can be the conduit for patient engagement.

How different would Dr. Ofri’s exam room feel if the patients came to the meeting already educated online about their condition and ready with detailed questions about their care? How mournful would Dr. Ofri’s essay read if she was able to ditch the desktop and quickly log her notes on an iPad? Or show her patients an animated program outlining her preferred treatment? Would her perspective be different if her chronic condition patients received systemized outreach to make sure they actually stayed with the treatment plan?

More from the Well blog

The data shows that moms are visiting Twitter and other places for health information. But once they get there, they don’t stick around. Ditto for mobile apps, Facebook and more.  Essentially, marketers are great at getting attention and not so great at keeping it. And they quite struggle to provide the sort of engagement and empowerment that consumers are searching for when they head online for health information. Thus, in a 2.0 world, moms are still spending most of their internet-health time traditional websites.

Our Take: Kudos to Health Populi’s Jane Sarasohn-Kahn for her excellent breakdown of this study. Her points were twofold. 1) To reach a mom with your digital content, it has to be good enough to win the cluttered competition for her attention. 2) Rushing to mobile is often a tactic without a strategy. People are too often focused on the way to reach their audience and not focused on what they’ll say once the connection is made.

At Engaging the Patient, we’re thrilled to see hospitals and health organizations devising new and more creative ways to reach out to patients with health information. But issues of patient engagement that have long plagued the inpatient experience are even more of a problem in the online world. At the hospital, if you are not engaging patients, they may still hear you, understand you and take action. But quite a few people will get the messages your team are trying to convey. Online,  if your content isn’t engaging, it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t show up in your Facebook fans’ newsfeeds. It goes unviewed, unshared, unconsumed. Frankly, it’s a waste of time and money.

This report shows that this is especially true for moms. They’re by and large too busy for a waste of time. And unless you can provide them with information and engagement they can use and keep using, your content is dead to them.

More from Health Populi

“Empathy requires energy, and with none to spare, we rescind into using words like exacerbate as early as our standardized patient encounters.”

Our Take: Patel  is right that empathy requires energy. For many clinicians, especially those just starting out—the workday is a grind. It doesn’t take many long shifts before it can be difficult to find the effort to go above and beyond. That’s why organizations that are able to systemically improve the patient experience do so by viewing it as a culture change. Empathy and careful explanations are easier when they are habit. When they are encouraged and expected by supervisors. And when they are supported by a network of patient-friendly tools and materials to further and follow-up on in-person explanations.

At the end of Patel’s story, he relates his experience watching a family care physician take extra effort to explain the functions of a pancreas in lay terms to a cancer patient. The doctor described the pancreas as, “bag of chemicals that help process food.” For that patient, a little bit of effort went a long way toward improving her understanding. Effort isn’t easy, and it’s not limitless. But it can make a profound impact.

FierceHealthcare.com- If you’ve got it, flaunt it. That’s the message from fiercehealthcare on patient satisfaction scores. Instead of simply looking at 3^rdparty patient satisfaction measurement as a hurdle to cross for reimbursement, many organizations are using these scores as marketing tools. Hospitals in California, Minnesota, and elsewhere are posting HCAHPS data on Facebook, Twitter and their websites. The goal is to attract new patients
with the satisfaction of your current ones.

Our Take: This isn’t so much news as confirmation of a new business reality. Most patients are never going to visit a CMS website to compare quality or patient satisfaction scores across organizations. You can be sure, however, that if your rival organization has better scores, that organization will be posting them on billboards, tv spots, social media outlets and more.

It’s marketing-fueled transparency. And it comes with sharper point. It’s possible for all hospitals in a town to provide excellent care or to concurrently promote indistinguishable slogans like, ‘leading medicine on the cutting-edge of science-based research-led care.’ But HCAHPS scores allow for more clear comparisons. They come in percentiles. Your competitor can say, ‘This hospital is better than that one,’ on a billboard and provide a data point that wasn’t previously available. So now it’s improve your HCAHPS scores. Then keep improving them. Or else.

More Information on FierceHealthcare

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