How To Achieve Patient Engagement For Value Based Care Success

Today the value-based healthcare delivery is trending than ever. Healthcare providers are started concentrating more on the technologies and tools to achieve value-based care effectively. But this won’t be possible and successful without strong patient engagement.

Healthcare organizations need to engage patients in their preventive care or through chronic care management. The provider’s goal should be on covering all patient populations including people who live in traditional areas.

So how to engage patients for value-based care? This article guides you with the smart tips to achieve patient engagement easily for value-based care success.

1. Engage patients in preventive care

The smart way to achieve good patient outcomes at a low cost is to engage patients in preventive care. Preventive care can also cost, but it will be less when compared to the high-acuity encounter.

For example, treating flu shots is less costly than treating a patient with a serious illness. So preventive care is a simple and one of the easiest solutions to high-cost care systems. But here achieve patient engagement is not very easy. The healthcare providers need to work carefully to improve patient engagement with preventive care b considers numerous factors including,

• Patient finances
• Patient health literacy
• Patient knowledge of care gaps missed screenings

With all these in mind, healthcare organizations can proceed with care delivery models and patient engagement strategies to engage patients in preventive care.

Some of the strategies includes,

• Patient navigation services
• Educating patients about the importance of preventive care
• Payment plans
• Patient outreach, appointment reminders for documented care gaps
• After-hours screenings

2. Supporting chronic disease management

Even when a patient has developed a chronic illness, value-based care models demand organizations be able to deliver good outcomes at a low cost. That requires clinicians to coach good chronic disease management, staving off high-acuity episodes in exchange for periodic, low-cost, and low-acuity touchpoints.

For example, a healthcare provider might design a chronic disease management plan for a patient managing high blood pressure, complete with regular medication, some healthy behavior change, and regular blood pressure monitoring. Each of those measures is a lower-cost option than a high-acuity emergency department visit, but like preventive care, it requires patient buy-in.

Healthcare professionals should be cautious of admonishing patients as non-adherent to chronic disease management; rather, clinicians should work to uncover the key barriers that keep patients from engaging in their care plans.

Many of the barriers limiting engagement in chronic disease management overlap with those limiting access to preventive care:

Social determinants of health

Limited healthcare literacy

Patient finances

In addition to organizational operations that can accommodate patient needs, clinicians should work with patients to uncover the individual barriers that are getting in the way of effective disease management. Perhaps the clinician could suggest a lower-cost medication regimen or could sign the patient up for the non-emergency medical transportation service offered at the clinic.

Through social determinants of health screening, healthcare providers can better shape their chronic disease management plans.

RELATED: 5 EFFECTIVE BENEFITS OF VALUE BASED HEALTHCARE

3. Driving positive patient experience

The overall healthcare experience and patient satisfaction scores play key roles in value-based care largely because they are part of the clinical quality measures assessed when determining value-based care reimbursement. Healthcare organizations that fail to achieve optimal patient satisfaction scores may not qualify for the maximum reimbursement rate in a value-based care model.

Delivering a good patient experience is challenging because satisfaction is often in the eye of the beholder. In other words, a good experience for one may fall short for another.

Healthcare organizations can improve patient satisfaction assessment scores by zeroing in on the key areas measured in these surveys, including patient-provider communication, facility cleanliness, patient safety, and patient education during hospital discharge.

And outside of formal patient satisfaction surveying, using good communication skills, reducing discomfort, and giving good self-care instructions all simply constitute good care that can, in and of themselves, improve outcomes.

4. Considering SDOH

Consideration for social determinants of health is the common thread that weaves through each domain of patient engagement. Value-based care relies on good patient engagement for all patients, and that means delivering care with cultural competency, understanding the social factors that influence patient care access and engagement, and being compassionate to patients with all needs.

Healthcare organizations cannot be successful in value-based care if they do not account for those underserved populations and design care delivery to overcome the SDOH that affects them.

Final Thoughts

As the healthcare world continues to move towards digital transformations and technologies, value-based care has been embraced as a great method to engage patients and for increasing healthcare quality.

CapMinds join hands with the top healthcare providers in the United States to deliver value-based care with the help of the best Medical billing software, EHR, Practice Management, and RCM solutions that result in improved patient engagement and increased profitability.