The widespread collection of healthcare data provides an opportunity for both macro and micro feedback on the state of the industry like never before, Todd Rothenhaus, MD, CMO for athenahealth, wrote in a blog post for the Harvard Business Review.
"Take my company, athenahealth. Our cloud-based software platform captures clinical and financial performance data in near-real time from more than 65,000 medical providers across the U.S," Dr. Rothenhaus wrote. "We can peer into our network and get an up-close view of the U.S. health-care industry in action, one billing claim or specialist referral at a time."
Among the many opportunities this affords athenahealth, the ability to use data to influence provider and medical staff behavior toward higher performance is an exciting one, according to Dr. Rothenhaus. Patient engagement through digital connections with providers is one increasingly important strategy on which athenahealth has set its sights.
"The problem is that practices on the whole aren't very successful at establishing and maintaining this essential connection with their patients," Dr. Rothenhaus wrote. "Recently, by analyzing millions of portal visits from more than 2,000 clients, we were first able to identify a host of basic interactions that could be streamlined, making the portal more user-friendly. This would be the type of strategy that any new-economy company would use, but is impossible for most health-care IT vendors who still live in the one-instance-per-customer, client-server world. Second, we performed a host of A/B tests to refine interactions on behalf of our customers to engage their patients, including better office workflows to enroll patients in the portal and direct-to-patient campaigns to encourage adoption."
Here are five trends in the data that the most successful providers within athenahealth's network display in terms of digital patient engagement.
• Age isn't a barrier to digital engagement. athenahealth's data shows that patient age range is rarely to blame for low portal-adoption rates. In fact, older patients sign into their portal account significantly more than younger patients for a variety of services.
• Portals work well for specialties, too. Specialty practices, such as orthopedics, also saw significant benefit from engaging patients electronically in terms of adherence and reductions of staff work.
• "Defaults" are effective at driving engagement. Practices using an "opt-out" approach to the patient portal by automatically registering users report a much higher adoption rate than practices that require patients to register on their own.
• Poor people are not necessarily at risk of being digitally disconnected. "Demography is not destiny," Dr. Rothenhaus wrote, as some athenahealth practices with heavy Medicaid case mix still achieved high adoption rates.
• Practices of all sizes can be successful at patient engagement. Data across athenahealth's network reflects no efficiencies of scale in terms of size. Practices seem to reflect similar adoption rates regardless of size.