Understanding of Patient Engagement and its Impact on Healthcare Systems

COVID-19 pandemic draws stakeholders’ attention to strategies highlighting the patients’ potential role and responsibilities in improving healthcare outcomes. Before outbreak, there has been a constant effort to inform and educate patients to be compliant and adhered to the treatment pathways that are planned for medical conditions based on existing evidence, insurers’ policies, and providers’ preferences. But rapid healthcare market transition reveals the game-changing impact of patients’ priorities and personal decisions on how they behave and respond to the available services. Facts supports the crucial need for in-depth understanding of Patient Engagement that prefers patients valued, informed, heard, activated to contribute to all aspects of care, even to the changes in care policies, decisions and processes. Patients have the right to access health records, prescriptions, and sources of information to take responsibility and control over their individual care. At the same time, they have the capacity to change decisions and personalize the care process based on individual variables in order to improve the system design and circumstances. As a result, passive unilateral patient engagement efforts such as patient and family education should evolve to active two-ways hearing of the patient voices incorporating their needs and expectations in individual care planning as much as health systems redesign and development. This evolution will be built on two fundamental changes;

• how patient-centeredness and patient engagement is defined and directed by payers, providers, and supplier industries,

• how accreditation and healthcare quality institutions measure, assess and evaluate patient-oriented interactions and reports.

Patient engagement requires exploring clinical and non-clinical insights from patients’ eyes in addition to the other stakeholders’ perspective to reduce the gaps between therapeutic systems’ and patients’ actual needs and preferences.