For years, healthcare leaders have emphasized the role of primary care in improving health outcomes, elevating patient experiences and reducing costs.
To date, though, few health systems have delivered the full promise of primary care.
During a February webinar hosted by Becker's Hospital Review and sponsored by Notable Health, Bri Buch, Patient Access Solutions Lead at Notable, and Mark Thiel, Vice President of Primary Care at Neenah, Wis.-based ThedaCare, discussed how primary care's strategic role in improving patient engagement and patient retention can be accelerated with intelligent automation.
Four takeaways:
1.) Primary care is a strategic lever to the health system, but realizing primary care's full value is limited by fragmented technology and a piecemeal approach to patient engagement. Specific issues affecting primary care include:
- Duplication of the digital front door. Patients are flooded with information from different channels, including primary care providers, insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and retailers such as Walgreens and CVS. Relevant information becomes difficult to discern and leads to fragmented relationships. "Patients are inundated with choices and it is up to health systems and their primary care networks to drive into this space with deeper engagement in order to build stickier relationships and improve health outcomes," Mr. Thiel said.
- Disengagement and disparities. The COVID-19 pandemic has weakened in-person patient engagement and widened health disparities, yet technology has not necessarily stepped in to fill these gaps.
- Caregiver burnout. Healthcare professionals are leaving the sector in droves, yet those who stay continue to bear significant administrative burden.
2.) To unlock primary care as the front door of health systems, it is essential to tune into what patients say, need and experience. ThedaCare's recipe for addressing the challenges of health information overload, disparities and disengagement includes:
- Becoming a proactive partner in health by earning and building patient trust with consistent engagement
- Moving upstream to close care gaps before they become gaps
- Ensuring continuity of care beyond the walls of the health system
- Strengthening the patient-provider bond with personalized experiences
3.) Platforms that simplify engagement and workflows can help organizations tap into the full potential of primary care. Transforming how patients interact with the health system builds loyalty, while integration of data directly into the EHR frees up staff and clinicians to focus on caring for patients. “As a key partner in our strategy for patient outreach, care gap closure, patient access and pre-appointment workflows, Notable is simplifying and standardizing our communication with our patients. They are supporting our primary care team to be a proactive partner in care,” Mr. Thiel said. "This part of our implementation roadmap is very exciting as we look to reimagine clinic workflows, moving human talent out of data entry roles into those that can add more value for the patient's journey.”
4.) Three best practices to increase patient satisfaction, access to care and patient retention stand out. They are: 1) simplifying patient engagement for all patients by complementing portals and apps with easy-to-use channels; 2) delivering consumer-grade digital experiences by looking outside of healthcare for the gold standard in personalization and convenience and 3) investing in staff and provider engagement by delegating repetitive administrative and clinical tasks to digital assistants. "A digital platform that only accounts for the patient experience will be short-lived; to have long-term success with digital tools, the staff and provider experience must also be optimized and accounted for," Ms. Buch said.
To register for Notable’s upcoming webinar on advancing population health through intelligent care gap closure, click here.