Cultivating a Digital Culture for Effective Patient Engagement

A Strategic Framework and Toolkit for Health-Provider Websites

Lorren Pettit

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032174938
• eBook ISBN: 9780429680182
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Marketing

Cultivating a Digital Culture for Effective Patient Engagement offers a strategic framework for healthcare provider websites in order to support patient engagement and connected health initiatives. Referred to as the Health Empowerment Web Strategy Index (HEWSi), the proposed framework is complemented by a detailed "check list" of health empowerment items organizations should incorporate into their website design.

A healthcare provider's website should be an effective resource for empowering the health of patients no matter where patients are in their digital culture evolution. The challenge for many organizations is that patient engagement/connected health initiatives are frequently developed and managed separately from the organization's digital marketing efforts. This book recognizes this disconnect and advocates for a reimaging of healthcare provider websites based on the four domains of the HEWSi strategic framework: (1) orienting; (2) enlightening; (3) aligning; and (4) personalizing. As a framework and toolkit, HEWSi helps breakdown patient engagement silos within healthcare organizations by allowing varied functional teams (marketing; web developers; patient experience staff; clinical leaders; HIM/HIS personnel; etc.) to congregate around a shared pathway for conversing, strategizing, planning, and developing an effective patient empowerment website.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The Digital Health and Patient Engagement Buzz

The healthcare industry is awash with buzzwords driving market innovations and strategic initiatives. This is evident by perusing most any healthcare publication or walking the exhibit floor of a healthcare trade show. Terms like “Big Data”, “Population Health”, “Patient Driven Payment Model (PDPM)”, and “Patient-Centric” scream out as the next biggest threat or opportunity facing healthcare leaders.

The challenge with “buzzword strategies” is that the leaders of healthcare provider organizations are tempted to chase after the latest and greatest “shiny object” in order to prove their mettle as a progressive leader. Yet, many may have a vague understanding at best of what the idea they are pursuing entails and little to no evidence to support the benefits these ideals will have for their patients and/or organization. This is not to intimate that new and innovative market ideas have little value. Quite the contrary, the explosive growth of innovation inundating the healthcare marketplace is encouraging and should be encouraged. Yet the cautionary note for healthcare leaders in this type of environment is to proceed purposefully by pursuing those strategies that can be supported by evidence.

Two “buzzwords” that have received a lot of interest in healthcare circles over the last few years are digital health and patient engagement. And for good reason, both ideas have strong evidential support surrounding their impact on positive outcomes for patients and healthcare organizations. Though neither term enjoys a universally accepted definition, there are basic tenets that generally explain what each idea encapsulates.

For the purposes of this book, digital health refers to the wide array of technologies available to healthcare providers and consumers designed to support the health information needs of patients, consumers, and/or providers. Digital health technologies can range from the wearable fitness trackers capturing patient-generated health data to the electronic health record hospitals employ. Many of these digital tools have functioned to help people gain control over their own lives by providing them with the information they need to make important personal health and wellness decisions.

Though rarely considered as such, the basic premise of this textbook is that provider organizations should consider their consumer/patient facing website as a digital health technology and incorporate their website as part of their digital health strategy. It is after all a digital technology designed to support the health information needs of patients, consumers, and providers. Yet few do despite that almost all healthcare provider organizations of any notable size, have a web presence. While websites across all industries historically functioned as an “electronic brochure” designed to offer the interested basic information about the organization (e.g. services offered, location, contact information), the uses of websites have changed as web tools and consumers have become more sophisticated. This shifting paradigm has not been lost on healthcare provider organizations but is certainly not universally true. Healthcare provider organizations have much room to grow in this area.

The other key buzzword of interest to this textbook, patient engagement, refers to a measurable behavior reflecting a patient’s sustained activation and expansion of their empowerment as a patient. Engaged patients understand their role in the care process; have the knowledge, skill, and confidence to manage their health and healthcare; and demonstrate sustained behaviors pursuing personal health goals. Having engaged patients is a priority many healthcare leaders are pursuing, because the benefits of having patients actively involved in their care are enormous.

To be engaged in one’s health though, a patient must be empowered. Patient Empowerment is a multidimensional process that helps people gain control over their own lives and increases their capacity to act on issues that they themselves define as important. Empowerment is realized in part when patients have the resources needed to achieve the control desired. As empowerment is not limited to those in a formal/informal relationship with a healthcare professional (e.g. patients), it is perhaps more appropriate to talk about Health Empowerment. Health Empowerment is not restricted to the disease model orientation of western medicine, encompassing the broader idea of wellness.

Health Empowerment Web Strategy Index (HEWSi^TM)

Pulling these two ideas together, the central argument of this book is that healthcare provider organizations can advance the engagement of the populations they serve by purposely leveraging their organization’s website as a tool of health empowerment. But to achieve this end, organizations should have a clear understanding of how their website can be used to empower the populations they serve. A framework therefore was needed to articulate how different components of a healthcare provider’s website can be leveraged to advance consumers and patients towards the organization’s patient engagement goals. The Health Empowerment Web Strategy Index (HEWSi^TM), presented in the remainder of this textbook, was developed to address this need.

HEWSi^TM is both a model and a tool. The HEWSi^TM model offers a structural framework for designing a website to empower patients and consumers. This framework is composed of four empowerment domains: Orienting, Enlightening, Aligning, and Personalizing. These domains lay the foundation for a website’s purpose (a.k.a. function) by reflecting the expansive health empowerment opportunities and progressive interaction between the provider and website user. Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 detail each of the four domains and include discussion questions at the end of each chapter to help stimulate conversations about the content presented.

Chapter 2 addresses the first and foundational functional domain in the HEWSi^TM framework, Orienting. Defined as publicly available information offered by a provider organization designed to introduce and familiarize its targeted audiences (e.g. consumers and patients) to foundational information about the provider organization, Orienting is arguably the most important and certainly most frequently accessed information on a provider organization’s website. Orienting consists of eight components:

1. Access
2. Identification
3. Leadership
4. Organizational Story
5. Payment
6. Performance
7. Real-Time
8. Services/Providers

Orienting communication is largely unidirectional, flowing from the provider organization to the website visitor.

The second functional domain, Enlightening, is addressed in Chapter 3. Enlightening refers to efforts by a provider organization to assist its targeted audiences (e.g. consumers and patients) to associate their individual health interests and experiences with established knowledge and resources. The intent of Enlightening is to help foster a deep personal and social understanding about a particular health topic, by aiding website visitors in contextualizing individual health needs/interests to an external resource. The type of information an individual seeks in educating themselves on a health topic of course varies by the specific issue. That said the type of Enlightening health content provider organizations place on their website arguably partitions into three categories:

1. Care Environment
2. Clinical
3. Experiential

Though the flow of communication in the Enlightening domain is largely unidirectional (from provider organization to website visitor), some aspects of this domain are dynamic as they require a thoughtful input by the website user.

Chapter 4 details the third functional domain Aligning. Defined as website content designed to activate and channel website visitors to pursue some type of behavior supportive of the provider organization’s efforts, the measure of success for Aligning is for website visitors to line up their behaviors with those advocated by the provider organization. The flow of communication under the Aligning domain is necessarily bidirectional, with opportunities for website visitor-initiated communications more extensive than one would see under the Orienting or Enlightening domains. While the measure of success in Aligning is for the website visitor to take some type of action, not all actions are equally important. Some acts require a greater degree of personal investment than others. Aligning recognizes these variances and partitions the demonstrated support into two classes of alignment:

1. Resource Alignment
2. Intimacy

The fourth and final domain of the HEWSi^TM model, Personalizing, is considered in Chapter 5. Personalizing is defined as content and tools tailored to known individuals made available by a healthcare provider organization in a secure website setting designed to empower an individual patient and/or consumer in realizing their optimal health and wellness goals. The targeted audience in this domain are not just website visitors, but known patients leveraging the provider’s website. Of the domains discussed, Personalizing arguably reflects the broadest array of content and tools provider organizations offer users of their website. To harness the varied constituents of this domain into a coherent format, the content and tools under this domain can be collated into the following three components:

1. Empowering Access
2. Empowering Control
3. Optimizing Empowerment

Personalizing represents the healthcare organization’s most exacting efforts of leveraging their website as a means of facilitating a digital culture.

Having established the function of the website as a tool to encourage patient engagement, with the domains of the HEWSi^TM model designed to progressively advance targeted audiences towards greater and sustained involvement in their care, the discussion in Chapter 6 then turns to the structural aspects, or “form”, of the website. Addressing the “form” of the website after detailing the “function” of the website is purposeful. Following the famous axiom that “form follows function”, the purpose of the website (its function) informs how the website is to be structured (its form) and therefore must be established first. While the HEWSi^TM framework recognizes the importance of the creative design aspects of web designs, the HEWSi^TM approach does not address the creative aspects of websites. HEWSi^TM is agnostic when it comes to the creative design of a website as the HEWSi^TM ideals should apply regardless of the website layout. Website teams looking for guidance on the creative, visual aspects of website design are encouraged to search elsewhere. There are many excellent resources available covering those issues. The discussion in this chapter limits its focus to the following two structural issues:

1. Issues impacting website users
2. Issues guiding content management

Having laid out the function and the form of the HEWSi™ framework, Chapter 7 of the textbook closes by addressing perhaps the most challenging issues healthcare provider organizations face: how to get patients activated in using the website and tools? How to sustain patient use of the website and tools? Though not an exhaustive treatment of these issues, the discussion here raises the importance of developing and implementing supportive strategies, because building a “killer” website will not be enough in itself to achieve the organization’s patient engagement goals.

Chapter 2

Orienting

The Navigational Challenge in Healthcare

Whether we realize it or not, those involved in the delivery of healthcare make an overwhelming number of assumptions about what patients want and, by extension, how ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Author
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Orienting
• 3 Enlightening
• 4 Aligning
• 5 Personalizing
• 6 Form
• 7 From Empowerment to Activation to Engagement
• Appendix: HEWSi™ Instrument
• Index