3 Factors Moving Healthcare From an Era of Physician-Driven to Patient-Driven Care

Last week, Wolters Kluwer held its annual media roundtable in Amsterdam. The event, held in conjunction with the release of the company's annual results, featured several healthcare leaders discussing trends in the industry and for patient care.

At the event, Mrunal Shah, MD, vice president of physician technology services at OhioHealth in Columbus, shared three factors, including changes in technology, that have begun to transform healthcare from physician-driven to patient-driven.

"We are finding that the patients are becoming closer to the center of their own care; they are actually helping direct what they want to have done," said Dr. Shaw.

1. Advances in technology. "The…thing that has happened outside of medicine, but medicine has been able to take advantage of, is the evolution of technology, and how quickly that technology has changed. Think about the Internet and what it has done for availability of information or the fact that we have all moved down the path of electronic health records, the fact that we have digitized almost everything we know about our patients," said Dr. Shaw.

2. Evidence-based medicine. "Evidence-based medicine now is very sophisticated, and it allows you to ask very intelligent questions and come back with very sophisticated answers," he said.

3. Mobility. "It was not that long ago that people thought of smart phones as being something only for certain people, but now 90 percent of our physicians run around with a smart phone, and almost all of them have tablets of some kind as well."

How do all of these advances in technology connect to patient-centered care?
According to Dr. Shaw, "What I think it does, is it increases visibility. We know a lot more about our patients when we're taking care of them, and we know a lot more about medicine and the current trends that we are seeing in medicine in a much more visible way than we have known in the past.

More Articles on Patient-Centered Care:

Survey: Physicians Are Ineffective at Patient-Centered Care
10 Recent Findings on Patient Engagement

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