When someone tells me they are a patient engagement company, I walk away having no idea what their company does. #cHealth16
— John Lynn (@techguy) October 20, 2016
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.