Patient engagement has been a catchphrase for several years now. Much like humpty dumpty after falling off the wall or the elephant being “viewed” by the 6 blind men, patient engagement has been split into many separate ideas— each given different priorities and emphasis by different stakeholders and organizations. If, instead, we could gather the pieces together and return to the whole egg or true elephant in the room, we’d find that engaging our patients can solve numerous problems simultaneously. Effective patient and caregiver engagement can avert medical, social, and legal problems before they arise.
By the very nature of our work, practicing physicians know we have been engaging patients for years. That doesn’t mean, however, that the modern evolution of patient engagement has to be a painful process of dubious merit. Instead, it means we are already in a strong position to leverage technology and communication to enhance care, improve patient and caregiver understanding, increase satisfaction with care, and maintain or recapture a healthy patient-physician relationship by helping patients become active participants in their own care.
Patient satisfaction plays an important role in assessing quality of care, but it shouldn’t be the end-all-be-all. Regardless of how much education and attention is provided, many aspects of optimal medical care are too complex for the uninitiated. This doesn’t mean we ignore patient education, engagement, and satisfaction. It does mean we have to be smart about how and what we communicate, taking the individual patient’s current burden of disease, burden of care, knowledge, and self-knowledge into account in our interactions.
Patient, caregiver, and care team involvement needs to be a value-added service, and it must be cost effective. An actual roadmap for the process of patient engagement would help. A cheap and easy roadmap would be even better, because a program that is too complex or too expensive to implement is counterproductive.
