This week, Dr. Geeta Nayyar, MD, MBA, is at HIMSS. Among the reasons she’s there is that she believes in the power of health IT play a key role in the creation of “smart” patients, patients who are educated, involved, and engaged in their care.
In a blog item she wrote from the show, Dr. Nayyar suggests that health IT is central to patient engagement — and will eventually be at the center of a concept known as Personal Health IT. I found this to be a fascinating idea, one which, as care devolves from centralized machinery to a dialogue with mobile devices, is likely to take the healthcare world by storm.
As she notes, mobility will be an essential element in any smart patient strategy, given the potential for mobile devices and apps to educate, inform and motivate patients around the clock. But patient engagement also calls for technology in the hospital or physician’s office. For example, she notes, this could include kiosks for updating a patient’s EMR, large display screens in exam rooms were doctors and patients are both few scans, lab reports and other findings together as a team.
After a physician encounter, a patient can then meet with another staffer who could download the Providers app to a smart phone or tablet, demonstrate how an e-prescription would work or even pass along a thumb drive with evidence-based studies, clinical instructions or relevant websites as part of a take-home package for patients, she suggests.
Dr. Nayyar concedes that for many clinicians, this will prove to be a disruptive experience and a dramatic change from traditional clinical and business protocol. What’s more, there are some patients who are not ready on that level, she admits.
But the notion of a mobility enabled smart patient strategy strikes me as an excellent idea. From Dr. Nayyar’s blog, it seems clear that this is all of the experimental stage but it seems to be heading in a very intelligent direction. What do you think?
