Every health care practitioner is on a constant quest to find ways to keep their patients healthy and well. This means finding new strategies to help patients stay healthy, fight off chronic conditions, and pay better attention to their health.
There are many strategies health care practitioners have taken advantage of to achieve this goal. One such example is improving patient engagement.
What is patient engagement, and why is it so important?
Patient engagement is defined as actively engaging a patient in their own healthcare. It involves giving patients the education, experience, and resources to better take care of themselves, stick to treatment regimens, monitor vital healthcare measurements, and act accordingly. Improving patient engagement can ultimately give a patient the confidence and ability they need to better care for themselves. This, in turn, can lead to better patient outcomes, lower healthcare costs, and less utilization of expensive healthcare services.
What are the benefits of improving patient engagement?
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- Increased knowledge of healthcare, symptoms, and ways to prevent disease while minimizing the potentially devastating impacts of chronic conditions.
- Reduction in the use of healthcare services, ultimately saving the patient, insurance company, and healthcare practitioner significant costs.
- Better sharing and communication of symptoms and health challenges, ensuring that a patient’s health needs are adequately being addressed.
- Increased practitioner efficiency, as patients will enter all appointments knowing what is wrong and what they need to communicate to their healthcare providers. This will allow practitioners to provide for quicker and more accurate treatment.
- Increased satisfaction with healthcare practitioners, as patients will feel as if they have adequately communicated their needs and had their concerns appropriately factored into any ongoing treatment plan.
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Technology’s role in patient engagement
Modern technology has a huge role to play when it comes to improving patient engagement. More and more patients are using the internet when researching symptoms, cures, and healthcare concerns. Doctors who can appropriately engage with patients can teach them how to use the internet and modern technology to better track and record all of this data. For example, modern apps can be used to record symptoms and vital health measures. This information can then be leveraged to better track symptoms, ultimately resulting in improved outcomes.