Amplifying the Voice of the Patient: A New Podcast from KLAS

Patient engagement is something we can all get behind. As patients, we want healthcare to be better, and it needs to be better. Serving the patients isn’t new; that is the whole purpose of healthcare. Here at KLAS, we are hearing things from the patient perspective in HIT, and we want to amplify patients’ perspectives and make them a part of our research. We want to share that knowledge with you in KLAS’ new podcast, “The Patient Voice: Amplified,” which recently premiered its first four episodes.

One of our goals with this new venture is to share nuggets of patient research knowledge that we have found throughout our reports and other research that we have done. We will be speaking with patients themselves—many of them will also be leaders in patient engagement, while others have insightful patient perspectives.

Hopefully, the stories and experiences shared through the podcast will show both KLAS’ commitment to patient engagement as well as how the healthcare industry is viewing patient engagement. As we have started the journey of kicking off this podcast, the following ideas stand out.

Be Patient; Change Is Coming

Part of what is driving patient engagement is the quadruple aim of healthcare, which focuses on creating better outcomes for patients, reducing costs, improving experiences, and reducing physician burnout. All of these are issues that healthcare leaders think about solving every day, and one of the best ways is to involve the patients more. Looking at how health plans are structured these days, we see that patients are incentivized to be healthier. We are starting to see some improvements, so we want to highlight those examples that help patients. The focus is shifting from the provider organization to the payers and the employers; they try to reduce costs and help the patients live a healthier life.

Patients Know What’s Troubling Them

Something interesting we saw was around telehealth. A little while ago, we at KLAS put out a social media study to find out what patients cared about and what they wanted to see in the future. Funnily enough, the big thing patients wanted to see before COVID-19 struck was telehealth. We did a telehealth report before the pandemic and saw that providers were using telehealth for 2.5% of visits at the high end of things, but for patients at that time, telehealth visits were the first or second thing on their list. That is an excellent example of the misalignment that can sometimes happen between patients and healthcare; patients were wanting telehealth well before it saw its spike during the pandemic. There are other areas that patients called out, such as the ease of scheduling, online pill pay, and provider communication, but we will go deeper into those in later podcast episodes.

Another clear issue is around how patients interact with the systems that are already in place. A CIO told us a few months ago, “I love working in healthcare, but I hate being a patient; I feel so stupid. I’m the CIO. I have access to the inner works of this entire organization, but my wife brings me a bill and I have no idea what to tell her.” That just paints a picture of the major gap present in healthcare. The CIO is someone that knows this technology inside and out but feels stupid as a patient. If we as patients can help align things better, we will have a way to really help the market.

Patient Engagement: Not the End of the World

Patients want to drive their own care, and they know what they want. We recently saw a hospital make a bit of an error involving self-scheduling that ended up proving a wonderful point. This hospital was trying to do more self-scheduling, but there was a lot of resistance from physicians as well as governance issues. There was one physician who was interested, and the hospital decided to enable self-scheduling for this one physician. However, they accidentally enabled it for everyone without knowing it. And it wasn’t disruptive. The earth did not explode. Everything worked out, and that hospital saw great outcomes. We know that there are things that patients want that are not yet aligned with what providers are focused on or what vendors are developing. But bringing in patient feedback and boosting patient engagement is critical to progressing healthcare and improving experiences across the board.

Amplifying Patient Experience

We want to utilize this podcast to highlight technologies that are making a difference as well as different patient journeys and where technology has helped or hindered. We are excited to bring in some of our friends and colleagues from around the world to join us and provide their insights and experiences, and we invite you all to tune in to this podcast whenever you can. If you have suggestions or ideas for future topics, please let us know at patientengagement@klasresearch.com.

Find The Patient Voice: Amplified podcast on Spreaker or on your favorite listening app. Subscribe to get notified about our most recent episodes.