Finding a One-Stop Shop in Patient Engagement Platforms
We live in a world where we can order food from any restaurant in a 50-mile radius and have it be at our house within an hour and a half. We live in an instantaneous world, so patients expect instant and meaningful access to healthcare, and health delivery organizations are looking for vendor partners to help them deliver that need. Healthcare organizations are always looking toward the quadruple aim of improving the key areas of healthcare:
- To improve the patient experience
- To lower costs
- To have better outcomes
- To improve the clinician experience
One of the key ways to move toward reaching those goals is to engage patients in their own care and ask them to be more responsible for their own health. Healthcare providers can no longer just wait for a patient to get sick because that results in more costs than would otherwise be there. Along with saved costs, there are also increased staff efficiencies from patient engagement solutions that allow organizations to better care for their patients.
A Culmination of Efforts
The Patient Engagement Platforms 2020 report is the culmination of reports based on research from vendors, providers, and patients over the last three years. The past reports that have led to this one are:
- 2018 Patient Engagement Summit
- 2019 Patient Engagement Future Trends Report
- 2019 Patient Engagement Ecosystem Report/Website
- 2019 Patient Engagement Summit
- 2020 Patient Voice Report
The focus of the Patient Engagement Platforms 2020 report is which vendors are capable of providing a one-stop shop solution for patient engagement. The report validates the reported platform capabilities in use today by deep adoptions from the vendors so that provider organizations can determine which vendor could most directly benefit them as well as learn which areas they would need to augment with outside solutions.
Patients and providers alike have told KLAS of the potential benefits to having a one-stop-shop approach. Providers are quick to point out integration and the consolidation of vendors as potential benefits. Just like passengers wanting the simplicity of purchasing airline tickets from a single airline site, patients want a single source of truth. No passenger would ever contract separately with the pilot, the stewardess, the person who sells the seats, the luggage handler, the airport, and the person who sells lunch. Yet in healthcare, we continue to struggle with using multiple tools, using different pay models, and having different access points.
The Future of Patient Engagement
Right now, when we think about patient engagement, we have to think about it in specific pockets: the patient portal, communication tools, telemedicine tools, online bill pay tools, and more. There is not currently one tool called “patient engagement” that encompasses everything in one combined, consolidated future solution. As we move into the future, we anticipate seeing a lot of consolidation and platforms becoming that one-stop-shop system.
It is important to recognize that the Patient Engagement Platforms 2020 report is an Advanced User Insights report that is representative of the most deeply adopting customers from each vendor. Many provider organizations are behind the adoption of the users represented in this report, so a big part of seeing where this space can grow will be seeing provider organizations continue to adopt and make steps toward helping patients become active participants in their health through patient engagement platforms.
Read the Patient Engagement Platforms 2020 report to learn more about the validated capabilities of vendors in this space.
Photo Credit: Adobe Stock, KatyFlaty