Patient Engagement in Low Value Care – Engage

This technical assistance package aims to provide insights and tools to implement patient engagement around overuse in your organization. Use all four components or focus on one element. Each section is broken into  sections by time commitment:

• If you have five minutes, check out our top five insights from each area.
• If you have twenty minutes, read sample scripts, review tools or listen to a short podcast.
• If you have an hour to dedicate, read the source journal articles, watch a webinar or join our learning network to connect with others.

If you have five minutes…

Five Things to Consider when partnering with patients in the planning and steering of low value care projects.

Establish an advisory group of patients and family advisors to help plan, implement and evaluate your low value care reduction project. Involving patient and family advisors from the beginning helps eliminate health care professionals’ and staff assumptions about what patients or families “want.”

Consider training patient and family advisors to provide a skill set that helps them help you. Studies show that patients want to be more involved in their own health care. However, patients may not have the needed competencies to optimize such patient engagement and shared decision making.

Involve patient and family advisors in the communications process, such as asking them to share which Choosing Wisely tools they feel are most useful, where to place those tools, and which messages encourage shared decision making.  Engaging patients in improving care may help implement processes that improve patient-provider communication and thereby reduce the likelihood of delivering unnecessary services and the health risks that can result.

Help patients co-lead change by putting patients and families in roles of real power and influence. Seek feedback and ask about inclusion and power dynamics. Patients and families need to be participatory partners rather than a box to check.

Actively engage patients to help act on survey data. Validated patient experience surveys are an important part of evaluating your practice. Putting the results into practice is an opportunity to move past consulting patients toward engaging patients.

If you have 20 minutes…

Read

• Let the patient revolution begin. This article discusses the importance of clinicians and patients working together to improve health care, and provides existing resources to do so.

• Communicating About Overuse with Vulnerable Populations – With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the ABIM Foundation sponsored a series of four focus groups to explore perceptions and beliefs about overuse in a historically marginalized group.

• Patient Engagement In Health Care Safety: An Overview Of Mixed-Quality Evidence This article provides a systematic review of evidence on patient engagement in safety.

• R-SCAN Project Designed With Patients – Clinicians at Main Line Health’s Riddle Hospital in suburban Philadelphia improved high-value imaging and reduced dose, cost and inconvenience for patients and their health system.

Watch

• Patient Engagement in 10 Minutes or Less – online “bite-sized learning” modules

Do

• “Let Patients Help”: a patient engagement handbook – This handbook describes how clinicians can further patient engagement. It is available in several languages.
• Inviting Patient and Family Participation in Implementation of Choosing Wisely® Tools – Practices can use this resource as a guide to begin engaging patients in implementing Choosing Wisely.

If you have sixty minutes…

Read

• How to Help Gastroenterology Patients Help Themselves: Leveraging Insights From Behavioral Economics – This article outlines interventions to improve patient behaviors, provider management decisions, and outcomes throughout  gastroenterology practice.
• Patients, Providers, And Systems Need To Acquire A Specific Set Of Competencies To Achieve Truly Patient-Centered Care. Three clinical scenarios are presented to illustrate imaginative models for shared decision making.
• Early Lessons From Four ‘Aligning Forces For Quality’ Communities Bolster The Case For Patient-Centered Care. The authors present early lessons on engaging patients to improve ambulatory care in four communities participating in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Aligning Forces for Quality initiative.

 Watch       

• Integrating Patient Family Engagement into Choosing Wisely Implementation – This webinar features stories from patient advisors about their experiences collaborating with practices to implement Choosing Wisely. 

Do

• Resources for Empowered Patients: Actions to Help You Manage Your Care. Massachusetts Health Quality Partners. From a patient perspective, the site lists the tools, guidelines, and information you may need to manage your health, interact with clinicians and the health care system, and find answers to questions you may have