Even after multiple years of patient engagement education, awareness training and related programming for its clinicians, PinnacleHealth Systems knew those efforts needed to continue if they were to move forward with new interventions. Here, Kathryn Shradley, director of population health, PinnacleHealth System, describes two key focus areas for clinician education.
We wanted to level-set on the definitions of patient activation and health literacy and what these terms meant to the organization and to the teams within. In full transparency, I want to be very clear: I believe initiatives for health literacy, patient engagement, patient education and population health will be on our task list for as long as I’m employed, and that’s okay.
We spent a lot of time educating front-line clinicians on health literacy, understanding who was using the Patient Activation Measure® (PAM®) and tools and attempting to broaden the language used around the health system. One of our initial goals was simply to have the words ‘health literacy’ be recognized and understood throughout the system. This is certainly still something we work on daily as a core piece of all of our engagement strategies. I’m happy to say that we have made progress.
One of the ways we obtained buy-in for our patient engagement strategy was to talk about the financial bottom line of low levels of patient activation and low levels of patient health literacy. We demonstrated to our executive teams, directors and managers that no matter where they were building an initiative and what they were building, if they didn’t include an engagement strategy in their product or service line, they were likely to experience difficulty—a difficulty that could otherwise be mitigated if we addressed some of these issues in their programs.
Source: Dual Approach to Patient Engagement: Activating High Utilizers and Coaching Clinicians
Dual Approach to Patient Engagement: Activating High Utilizers and Coaching Clinicians describes PinnacleHealth’s two-pronged strategy for prioritizing patient engagement among its clinicians and patient population, tactics that elevated key quality and clinical metrics in the process.
Tags: health literacy, patient activation, patient activation measure, physician coaching, physician engagement
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