Medssenger Team
In today’s healthcare, it’s not easy to be a patient. Care delivery is inefficient, records are fragmented, communication is lost, and coordination is broken. The care as a whole is incomplete. With advancement in medicine, more processes, records, tests, workflows, and treatment plans are being provided to treat patients, ironically making the whole system work more inefficiently due to its fragmentation and gaps everywhere, and also overloading patients with information. Research has shown that patients immediately forget 40-80% of what their providers tell them. Furthermore, patients may remember 50% of what they hear incorrectly leading to misinformation, which significantly affects the outcome.
What would help resolve this serious problem?
Better patient education needs to be provided along with capability for patients to communicate better with their providers through proper coordinations among care team.
A recent AHRQ guide discussed implementation of a new patient-provider communication strategy such as patient teach-back, to boost patient education and care quality. Patient education enhanced by effective patient-provider communication can improve outcome through better quality of care, patient safety, and patient adherence.
For instance, in one educational program conducted in 100 patients with rheumatoid arthritis over 6-month period, 85% patients who received continuous patient education were compliant compared to 55% patients without education. Such difference is significant, since according to studies, the lack of patient adherence significantly affects patient outcome, causing at least 10% of hospitalization and substantial increase in morbidity and mortality, along with costs of care. In the US alone, avoidable costs from non-adherence range from $100 to $289 billion annually. Moreover, a study showed that patients who received hospital-based asthma education had better controlled asthma with over 60% reduction in ED visits and admissions. This saved ED charges for the study cohort by about $600,000 and inpatient charges by about $230,000 for a hospital with total ED cost charges of about $2 million.
With shifts in healthcare to value-based models, improving patient outcome and satisfaction through better patient education has become an area with great needs to providers and payers. Patient education plays an important role in patient-centered care as it requires patients to be a partner in the care team and take ownership of their care through empowerment.
However, providers do not have proper tools to deliver effective patient education, which requires connection and communication between patients and providers as well as coordination among care team members across transitions of care.
That’s where Medssenger could help through an innovative healthcare IT platform that connects everyone involved in care delivery though better communication and coordination, enabling seamless care anytime anywhere. Medssenger can deliver effective patient education along with proper workflow. For the needs of patient education, Medssenger could help not only prescribe medication and treatment but also prescribe patient education while connecting patients and providers through communication to enhance engagement. This capability will lead to reduce readmission, improve progress and recovery time, and prevent avoidable costs, helping all patients, providers, and payers in the value-based, patient-centered care.