What ‘Patient Empowerment’ Really Means — And How Digital Platforms Can Improve The Physician-Patient Relationship

Medicine, and healthcare as a whole, is not about getting patients to do what you tell them to do.

It’s about empowering them to take action in their own lives — and being there to help them every step of the way.

In the world of digital health, everyone from investors to physicians talks about the importance of engaging patients. “It’s all about engagement,” they say, pointing to some new model in the hopes that by digitizing the process, all will be fixed (and some element of the business will turn more profitable).

I tend to view it differently.

When it comes to engaging patients with their healthcare options, I would much rather frame the question as, “How can we empower them?” As a physician, the truth is, I don’t want to simply engage my patients. I want to give them the tools to maximize or improve the results they see from their healthcare. That way, they have “skin in the game,” because they are being given the tools to work on their own health, themselves.

Digital health has the opportunity to improve the effectiveness of preventative care.

Right now, the healthcare ecosystem as a whole encourages a reactive approach to health.

When you get sick, you go to the doctor. When you need a hip replaced, you schedule surgery. But up until those acute moments of need, there is very little interaction between patients and their healthcare providers. Personal health is exactly what it sounds like: a personal practice with very little outside aid.

Digital health has the opportunity to solve that problem.

Obesity, diabetes, heart disease — these are medical problems that are difficult to control and solve with a reactive approach. The real solution is by preventing them from happening in the first place, which starts with patient education and staying on top of things early on. As someone becomes pre-diabetic, it’s not about just ‘engaging’ them — that’s not a long-term solution. It’s about helping them understand what’s going on, and giving them the tools to avoid or prevent the development of diabetes, which would then require insulin, additional hospital visits, and increased healthcare costs.

It’s not about engagement. It’s about making the link in the patient’s mind between their daily habits to their personal health — and digital health is a viable way of doing that.

Here’s how:

There isn’t one “right answer” for how to empower a patient.

As we have already seen in the digital health space, gamification and incentives have proven to be effective ways to reward positive behavior. For example, if a patient exercises on a daily basis, and their wearable technology logs activity into an app managed by their healthcare provider, they may be rewarded with a lower monthly insurance premium for reaching certain goals. Why? Because that physical activity is seen as preventative care, which likely reduces future healthcare costs. It’s a win-win.

But for a digital health solution to be truly beneficial, it needs to hit on multiple points in a patient’s life. It needs to reward their behavior so they see compounding results, but there also needs to be an education element that helps them understand why it’s important. Something as simple as informing a smoker that if they continue the behavior of not smoking, they could extend their life by fifteen years, is tremendous. But this could be delivered in a more personalized way also — which means the way certain information is delivered, and when, can have a significant impact on both how a patient responds to the technology, as well as how long they remain consistent with it. So, it’s the concept of achieving long term behavioral change by providing not only short term reward, but then linking that to real, meaningful education and then even relating it to what’s important to the them (the consumer, the patient). If you could tie a real outside person into the process (the provider), that makes it even more powerful.

This is what makes preventative care a very different challenge than acute-event care — such as a surgical intervention, or some sort of life-changing incident. The latter focuses on patient engagement at a very high level in a short window of time, whereas the former looks to encourage behavioral changes that can have a much longer lasting effect.

This is what our population needs.

The truth is, it’s not too much for a patient to ask for more effective communication — which is precisely what we’re talking about here at its most basic element. When a patient walks into a physician’s office, they have questions. Sometimes, questions they aren’t quite sure how to ask, or feel comfortable asking. Our job, as physicians or healthcare entrepreneurs, isn’t just to be there in moments of crisis. It’s to support patients in ways that keep those crisis moments to a minimum.

In its most basic form, it’s just good customer service.

Patients want open communication and proactive feedback. They want to feel educated about their personal health and, as a bonus, be rewarded for practicing positive behaviors. Which means, as digital health pioneers, it’s on us to say, “We care about you, and we are going to set up these digital processes to deliver on all of those touch-points.”

Remember: patient empowerment isn’t about replacing the physician in the patient-healthcare provider relationship. It’s about creating mechanisms to improve the relationship, every step of the way. It’s about educating the consumer and creating a situation where they want to take hold of the reins.