Patient engagement isn’t always about patient portals. “In fact, most of the time it’s not,” said Pamela DeSalvo Landis, vice president of information services at Carolinas HealthCare System, the second largest public, nonprofit healthcare system in the United States.
That’s particularly true among providers embarking down the road to population health management efforts that consider more than one patient at a time.
Landis will outline that challenge to attendees of a session titled “Engaging Patients to Improve Care: An Inside Look at Where and How it is Working,” at the HIMSS16 in Las Vegas beginning late next month.
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Landis will be joined by Chanin Wendling, director of Gesinger in Motion, and Kevin Fowler, a consultant with the Kindey Health Initiative at the Patient Family Partnership Council.
“How and what do we give to patients that is useful in improving their daily health status?” Landis said. “That’s our challenge.”
Carolinas HealthCare System has found an innovative way to answer that question with the release this year of a new mobile app, MyCarolinas Tracker, which the health system will showcase at HIMSS16.
MyCarolinas Tracker not only collects data from more than 70 devices and apps but “it also takes that data and provides clinical context about it,” Landis said. “Then it goes one step further after telling patients what all the data means and links patients to their care providers.”
MyCarolinas Tracker is available in the App Store and Google Play, and is one of the first health system apps that connects the patient and provider around the health data that patients track on their phones, according to a Jan. 13 release by the health system.
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The app supports data gathered from fitness trackers, blood pressure cuffs, glucometers, scales and heart rate monitors. A similar app is available direct-to-consumer.
Geisinger, for its part, has been pursuing patient engagement and population health work for some time, seeing success with portals, texting, apps and even launched earlier this year a program to refund certain dissatisfied surgery patients.
And the Kidney Health Initiative has been focusing on understanding patient preferences as well as participating in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's FDA Patient Engagement Advisory Committee.
During the HIMSS16 session, speakers will focus on case studies of successful demonstrations of the use of patient engagement in population health and will include how organizations are using patient engagement technologies, such as, patient portals, texting, secure messaging and online patient education to target those with chronic conditions and reduce care gaps.
The session, "Engaging Patients to Improve Care: An Inside Look at Where and How it is Working,” will be held Feb. 29 from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. at the Sands Expo Convention Center, Lando Room 4201.
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