In the Becker's Hospital Review 5th Annual Meeting in Chicago, Keith Griffin, MD, medical group CMIO and Richard Capps, MD, CMIO, of Winston-Salem, N.C.-based Novant Medical Group discussed the ways in which Novant leveraged mobile and health information technology to successfully increase patient engagement.
"We need to think like the patient," said Dr. Capps. "We need to think about how we can empower patients and empower caregivers to give patients a remarkable experience. At Novant, we also wanted to focus on simplicity and convenient ways for the patient to use technology."
According to Dr. Capps, the decision to include patient engagement as a part of the electronic medical record was made early on in the EMR implementation process. They started seeing dramatic results — they currently have 300,000 active users on the portal, 51,000 emails coming in and 3 million results were released electronically to patients in the last year.
"We have 20,639 mobile application users and 12 of our electronic portal users are over the age of 100, which just goes to show that the portal users aren't necessarily who you think they are going to be," said Dr. Capps. "Organizations that say that they are not seeing a return on investment on the technology they have adopted are the organizations that are not tracking it properly and engaging patients."
Dr. Griffin described some of the features of Novant's online and mobile efforts that integrate patient engagement elements. For example, the online patient portal includes a symptom checker as well as resources for good health-related information. "We try control what kind of information the patient is getting rather than letting them depend on Google for health information," said Dr. Griffin.
Novant also ramped up the number of e-visits it offered, which is an online visit and limited to certain conditions. "If the physician feels as though he doesn't have enough information based on the e-visit, he calls them in," said Dr. Griffin. Novant also offers integrated and automated health reminders and online bill payment.
"Healthcare organizations need to think about how technology touches the patient," said Dr. Capps. "Also, offer it to everybody. You will be surprised at who all want to be engaged and in different ways."