Yesterday, we took umbrage at what struck us as a bit of “preachifying” by a health IT stakeholder.

At issue was the apparent lack of support of EHRs by the public, and his reasons why that lack of support was “wrong”.  So today let’s turn it around an look at a different, eminently more hands-on approach to patient engagement.

In introducing an array of gadgets and gizmos designed to get patients plugged in, this observer notes “with the introduction of Meaningful Use Stage 2, patient engagement has gone from nice-to-have to necessary, and that transition requires hospital systems and physician practices across the country to look to tools to aid in the process.”

She helpfully (in our view, any way) quotes a stakeholder who argues that patient engagement is “about facilitating the learning process and finding ways of offering the range of opportunities to people in a seamless way, rather than have a bunch of separate systems and tools out there patients have to hunt and find."

After that, the reader gets to wander down a line of new offerings.  One, from Patient Engagement Systems, “allows primary care doctors to identify, manage, and draw in patients with chronic diseases. The platform assembles laboratory, pharmaceutical, and other clinical data into a Web-based platform, which delivers patient-centric clinical decision support. At the same time, the platform transmits personalized messages that familiarize patients with care plans.”

Another, the Better Day Health app, “is a Web-based, patient-centered health and practice management software platform that is designed to drive improvements in patient care quality, coordination, and collaboration.”

And yet another, from WellFX, “is a cloud-based healthcare tool that extends care and patient engagement outside provider visits, with an aim of improving healthcare outcomes and costs. In addition, the system is HIPAA compliant and acts as a social platform for providers to deploy in their patient, staff, and agency communities.”

We haven’t spent a lot of time vetting the potential pros and cons of these offerings, but regardless of their ultimate effectiveness it seems safe to suggest that patient engagement will increase largely as a result of ever more opportunities for patients to plug in a tangible way, and not just because someone tells them they “should.”

Photo courtesy of jimg944 via Creative Commons