Creating Lasting Engagement in Healthcare

Engagement in healthcare takes on many forms. Marketing can catch a patient’s attention or offer a solution for their symptoms. Patient experience ensures they feel seen and have a positive opinion of the healthcare they receive. Patient care engagement is necessary to ensure patients take actions to get or remain healthy. Physicians and staff need to be engaged for many of the same reasons and to ensure the healthcare organization has adequate resources to provide care. Communities and governmental agencies need to be engaged to provide support for healthcare organizations and individuals. The list goes on.

Engagement has taken many forms in recent years for each of these contexts. Gamification efforts, social media, wearable technology, and more have all added new metrics and definitions for success when it comes to engagement. At the core of all of these concepts, though, remains the patient.

To be successfully engaged, patients need to buy into their own wellness. Caregivers, providers, administrators, and leaders should buy into the organization’s mission. The hard part is that this cannot be forced. There are ways that it can be promoted, maybe even engineered, but it will always hinge on the individual making their own connection to what they want.

The solution can take on several forms based on what resources are available. A broad “shotgun” style approach, trying a little bit of everything and preventing adequate resources from being dedicated to any one initiative, won’t be successful. It is best to identify your specific needs first based on data. Are patients not complying with discharge orders, resulting in higher readmission rates? Are patients not presenting to your facility in the first place? Are you experiencing higher than usual turnover? Has there been a sudden decline in quality scores?

Essentially, engagement strategies need to come from a strategic planning process. Often, it is best to complete this process in service line areas (e.g., cardiovascular, neurosciences, surgical services, orthopedics, oncology, etc.) that have the greatest impact on your organization, in addition to whole-house planning. Rushing into a solution without understanding the need can do more harm than good.

However, not all of this engagement is in the hands of the healthcare system directly. Before really engaging with healthcare, patients need to decide when to take action. Some put off symptoms until they become debilitating, while others seek care at the first sign of feeling off. These decisions are deeply tied to individuals’ values, socioeconomic factors, family history, perceptions of healthcare, and more. Making deliberate changes to increase the accessibility of care and help patients feel not just the health benefits, but also other rewarding aspects of wellness, will help to increase patient engagement across the board.

The payoff to all of this is that when real engagement is achieved, it can create a very strong bond that adds more value for everyone involved. Physicians who care about their program are more likely to support growth, participate in outreach initiatives, and remain with the organization. Those physicians who are performing well will often have more satisfied patients who feel more connected to their local healthcare organization and become an advocate for your program. Think of patients who have chronic pain relieved and become advocates in your community, or how birthing centers can forge lifetime bonds with families.

The throughline for all of this is that engagement in healthcare is a marathon. Every single person engages with healthcare in some way or another from the moment they are born. The best that we can do is ensure that high-quality services are there when they are needed, thoughtful resources are being added to ease the burden on the individual and their family, and that employees are taken care of to continue to provide these vital services in the community.