Although patients are engaging in digital patient-provider communication, they aren’t discussing the terms of communication during in-person appointments.
About half of patients are using health IT for patient-provider communication, but only around a fifth are having in-person conversations with their clinicians about it, according to new research out of the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University.
And it’s that very lack of in-person communication that can eventually hamper remote, tech-enabled conversations and relationships, Joy L. Lee, PhD, a Regenstrief Institute research scientist said.
“The results of our statewide survey indicate patients are using health information technology,” Lee said in a statement.
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“However, they aren’t talking to their provider about it,” added Lee, who is also an assistant professor of medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine. “One of the few widely agreed upon recommendations for electronic communication in healthcare is for providers to be talking to their patients about it ahead of time. This does not appear to be happening regularly, and may be impacting the use of this technology.”
Health IT, and particularly patient portals, has opened up a critical opportunity for providers to deepen patient relationships and communicate with patients outside the four walls of the hospital. Through secure direct messaging, telehealth, and other asynchronous health deliver tools like text message and email, providers are able to connect with patients remotely and mitigate patient problems without an office visit.
That’s helped cut the cost of an in-person visit, while also driving convenience for both the patient and the provider.
After surveying Indiana University Health patients about their patient portal and tech-enabled provider communications, the researchers were heartened to see these tools are playing a role in connecting patients and providers.
In total, 47 percent of patients across the state are using health IT for patient-provider communication. Thirty-one percent said they use secure direct messaging functions within the patient portal, while 24 percent said they communicated via email and 18 percent over text message.
But it’s their secondary finding that was more startling: a mere 21 percent of patients are talking about their digital communication with providers during in-person visits. In other words, patients and providers are using technology to communicate, but they aren’t touching base about that when they meet in person.
As Lee pointed out, this can have negative consequences for the patient experience.
The advent of tech-enabled patient-provider communication may have opened up opportunities for provider relationships, but it also opened the boundaries of work and life. For example, a patient may send a patient portal message with the expectation of an instant reply, but the provider might be in with a patient. With patient expectations unmet, the provider might yield a poor patient experience.
To prevent that issue, most tech-savvy clinicians recommend their peers set up reasonable expectations for technology communication with their patients. Saying what types of messages are appropriate for digital communication, setting benchmarks for how quickly the clinician will follow-up, and setting up “digital office hours” are good practice to create a healthy digital relationship with the patient.
But this latest survey data shows that only about a fifth of clinicians are setting up those expectations in person, something that could be a hit to patient experience and potentially discourage future patient engagement technology use.
“This lack of conversation may lead to patients not taking advantage of these online communication platforms which have strong potential for patient engagement,” said David Haggstrom, MD, senior author on the paper and interim director of the Regenstrief Institute William M. Tierney Center for Health Services Research.
Haggstrom, who is also an associate professor at the IU School of Medicine and a researcher at the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center, reiterated some of the key strategies for digital patient-provider communication and patient portal messaging.
“Individuals may be more likely to use messaging if they know what subjects are appropriate and how their provider might respond,” he advised. “We need to look at providing more support for both patients and providers to facilitate these conversations. The need for remote communication has been dramatically highlighted in the rapidly changing healthcare environment associated with COVID-19.”
This data was collected prior to COVID-19, a global pandemic that altered the way in which patients and providers must interact. As more healthcare became remote, patient engagement technologies like the patient portal became integral.
It is possible that since providers have been forced to lean even harder on their patient portals, they have outlined messaging guidelines with their patients, Lee stated. Nonetheless, the lessons from this data are salient.
“How patients and providers are using technology to communicate may have changed over the last few months in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, but having a shared agenda about how to communicate, what is appropriate to send as a message, and being able to discuss it openly is still important to foster the electronic patient-provider relationship,” Lee said.
Source: Patient Engagementhit