A Patient Engagement Company Could Be Anything

I’ve been spending the past couple days at the Connected Health Symposium in Boston. After talking to hundreds of people I was realizing my problem with companies saying that they are a patient engagement company. If you tell me you’re a patient engagement company, then I have no idea what you do.

The same isn’t true for an EHR company. If you say that you’re an EHR company, then I know that you’re helping doctors chart electronically. Sure, some people have used that term incorrectly or have executed poorly, but we all basically know what a company is doing if they’re an EHR company. Same is true for revenue cycle management companies and practice management software vendors.

The same can’t be said for patient engagement companies. If you say that you do patient engagement, that could literally be anything. In fact, is every company a patient engagement company?

I think we should banish the term patient engagement when describing a company. Instead, companies should tell us how they’re engaging the patient. Then, we can have an idea of what you’re doing and be able to understand how you fit into the healthcare ecosystem.

Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t engage patients. Absolutely not. We 100% should be doing patient engagement. However, there are 1000s of ways that we can engage patients and many of them don’t involve technology at all. Those can all be great things, but it’s not a category of software companies.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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