Consumerism is changing how we interact with our care providers. Connecting patients more closely to care providers is especially important after discharge from a facility. My colleague Melody Smith Jones @melsmithjones shared an e-Patient petition to the ONC in her whitepaper Patient 360: The Complete View of Patient Engagement that stated “Nothing would result in improving the health of the population (and decrease healthcare costs) more than having greater involvement/engagement by individuals in the healthcare process.” Melody also shared the expected rise in telehealth services from 350,000 in 2013 to 7M in 2018.
Empowering patients means more than providing content about an illness and providing reminders about appointments. At KP Oncall it is about better insights into the patient “conversation” and follow-ups outside the walls of the facility. Recently, Jan Guzik, NP, Product & Clinical Service Development at KP OnCall, a division of Kaiser Permanente of Southern California, joined us for a webinar to discuss how KP OnCall is leveraging technology to empower patients and reduce overall healthcare costs. Jan shared that KP OnCall is offering remote care to minimize “in person” care, unless essential or desired by a patient.
KP OnCall uses Oracle technology to provide the “Web Self Service & Nurse Chat” solution to empower patients with a choice of self-assessment versus waiting to speak to a nurse on the phone or go in for an appointment. Via a web interface, the solution walks the patient through a series of Q&A about their symptoms to determine next steps in their care. A whopping 94% of patients using the solution said that they would prefer to use the tool again vs. waiting to speak to a nurse. Not only are patients happier, KP OnCall is also projecting a reduction in expense related to call center staffing as they add more protocols and more tightly integrate the solution into their patient portal.
Perficient specializes in implementing digital technologies in healthcare and we’d love to talk to you about how we are helping clients solve these challenges.
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