The healthcare industry is challenged to reduce costs while still providing quality care. Something needs to shift—but who bears the responsibility for making the change?

The New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst Insights Council recently surveyed its members to address the question: How responsible are patients for reducing costs?

Survey results show that Council members believe that responsibility for lowering the cost of care is shared across stakeholders. Hospitals/health systems (chosen by 95% of respondents) and clinicians (94%) top the list for responsibility, with government (88%) and patients (83%) close behind.

The results also show that industry practitioners believe that patients lack the education they need to be effective participants in managing the cost of their care:

• 61% indicated that patients don’t have enough information to affect the cost of their own healthcare-related decisions.
  
• 78% said that assessing the total cost of care is extremely challenging for patients. 

What does this mean for the healthcare industry? To move the needle on containing costs, hospitals and other healthcare providers need to educate and engage their secret weapon—the patient.

We’ve spent the past couple weeks talking about a four-hospital system in the Midwest that has used digital education to establish real-time patient-provider connections outside the hospital. These connections, delivered throughout the care episode, have focused on helping to guide or change patient behavior and achieve better outcomes.

Read Part One in our series to learn how this hospital system made digital education a standard of care.

What are the practical steps this hospital took to create an automated, engaging and impactful patient education program—one that lives up to the hype about patient engagement impacting care and cost? And, most importantly, how can you recreate it?

Read on for 8 key strategies to bridge the gaps between a physician’s direct care and patient self-care in order to control costs and outcomes throughout the patient journey:

A four-hospital system in the Midwest uses the SmarteXp® patient engagement platform to educate patients for better outcomes. What they’ve found, however, is that patient engagement also has a transformative effect on hospital staff and workflows.

Educating patients digitally and automatically throughout the care episode addresses questions that patients would otherwise pose to their nurses and physicians. That saves those medical professionals time and helps them care for patients more efficiently and effectively.

Read A Case Study in Successful Patient Engagement Part One: Make Digital Education the Standard of Care

Hospitals have long been challenged to reduce costs while improving outcomes. Now, more than ever, they need to maintain high standards for patient experience, while focusing on hard metrics such as readmissions, length of stay, emergency department use, discharge destination and day-of-surgery cancellations. The financial implications of ignoring those metrics are simply too big. At a four-hospital system in the Midwest, the cost of emergency department visits alone ranges from $500–$4,000 per visit.

There, the CMIO was interested in pairing technology with targeted content to improve these metrics. For 10 years, this hospital system had used UbiCare’s SmarteXp® digital patient engagement platform to connect with and educate expectant and new parent patients. Healthcare providers there knew it was effective in engaging this population.

The CMIO saw research that showed the efficacy of digitally educating and engaging total joint replacement patients from pre-op through post-op and was intrigued. He was confident his health system could do even better, by digitally guiding joint replacement patients and setting their expectations before and after surgery.