Understanding Patient Engagement and its Impact

Rapid healthcare market transition reveals the game-changing impact of patients’ priorities and personal decisions on how they behave and respond to the available services. Facts support the crucial need for the in-depth understanding of the Patient Engagement concept that prefers patients valued, informed, heard, and activated to contribute to all aspects of care, even to the changes in care policies, decisions, and processes. Patients have the right to access health records, prescriptions, and sources of information to take responsibility and control over their individual care.

Beneficial groups promote such an understanding of the concept by focusing on digital platforms for access and communication, in comparison, paying less attention to patients’ higher capabilities to change decisions and personalize the care process based on individual variables, priorities, and expectations. Furthermore, patients are the best source of experiential knowledge to improve system design and circumstances as partners. 

• Passive unilateral patient engagement efforts such as patient and family education should evolve to active two-ways hearing and reflection of the patient voices in individual care planning as much as in health systems redesign and improvement.
• Patient engagement leadership will be built on two fundamental transformations: 1) how patient-centeredness and patient engagement is defined and directed by current influencers such as payors, providers, and supplier industries, 2) how accreditation and healthcare quality institutions measure, assess, and evaluate patient-oriented interactions, and reports. 
• Patient engagement requires considering clinical and non-clinical insights from patients’ eyes together with the other stakeholders’ to reduce the gaps between current therapeutic systems and patients’ actual needs and preferences.