Patients as Partners is the Goal. Here’s How to Get There

For healthcare organizations looking to provide more patient-centered care, it helps to see what others have been able to achieve by advancing their efforts to support, engage, activate, coach, and ultimately partner with patients. Our Patient Partnership Maturity Model helps organizations identify where they are on the path to partnering with patients, and their strategy and technology needs for enabling more consistent and authentic relationships with patients. From supporting to partnering with patients, each step in the model is essential and providers and patients reap many benefits.

Support transactions with patients occur at specific moments in the care journey, primarily through the distribution of educational materials during visits but also during inbound calls and/or patient portal messages. While this is the baseline for accreditation and regulatory requirements, health systems who go beyond the basics often see improvements in service delivery and patient satisfaction. For example, a 2019 analysis of nearly 274,000 patient portal messages from a California-based health system found that frequent users of the portal had fewer preventable hospital visits than patients who didn’t use the portal. More than 90% of users also said the experience was convenient and helped them be better informed.