Connected Health: New models of patient engagement
BOSTON--The shift to patient-centered care requires a multipronged approach, and diverse leaders in the connected health field shared their cutting-edge patient engagement efforts during a panel session at Partners HealthCare’s 10th Annual Connected Health Symposium.
Adam Hanina, MPHIL, MBA, cofounder and CEO of Ai Cure Technologies, said his company is making strides in developing technology that so far has shown to significantly increase medication adherence. Funded by a National Institute of Health $3.5 million grant, the company utilizes cutting-edge technologies to determine whether proper medical adherence was achieved and capture data on its real-time dashboard.
For instance, its Automated Directly Observed Therapy software solution confirms medication ingestion for use with tablets and pills. In one clinical study geared to schizophrenics, adherence rates have jumped to 80 percent, he said. It currently is in Phase 2 clinical trials. Another technology utilizes computer vision technology to confirm that a patient has correctly used their inhaler device.
“If the patient doesn’t do what [he or she is] meant to do, the risks of not behaving correctly are profound for the system. Patient engagement is about stakeholder alignment,” said Hanina.
David Judge, MD, medical director of Ambulatory Practice of the Future at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), works to engage patients in the design process to help MGH better understand the ideal patient engagement environment.
“Space design, how a team is put together, customer service—they all have huge implications for connected health,” he said. Judge said patients want a “partnership” with a physician/nurse/practitioner team that supports them, and this requires a cultural change on the part of providers.
Part of that is accepting the idea that all patient data are shared with them. “Some physicians hesitate but it’s not crazy, it’s safe and better care,” Judge said.
Benjamin Heywood, president and co-founder of PatientsLikeMe, discussed the platform’s ability to allow patients with chronic disease to share their real-world experience and provide structured data on outcomes. To date, the platform has been used in 35 peer review articles, he said. In one success story, patients with epilepsy using PatientsLikeME reported additional activation and better outcomes due to their use of the site. “If I could create a pill for that, I’d be a much richer man,” joked Heywood.
In other comments, Heywood said that the information within EHRs “is not of much use” and predicts that once a better framework is developed to measure health, “We’ll learn we have no meaningful data and we’ll start from there.”
Patients want to be involved in decisions along the way; in medicine, they are disempowered and not given a voice, said John Moore, MD, PhD, CEO of Atelion Health. “They want to feel like they are being cared for and supported, they don’t want to be put out on their own.”
Atelion Health has developed a cloud-based platform to help doctors and patients work together more closely to manage chronic diseases like diabetes, HIV or hypertension, Moore said. The platform provides no alarms or beeps, but an awareness of when actions are required. “It provides rich feedback of associated actions and outcomes,” he said.
Health coaches are available for instant messages, which mostly entail conversations about diet and exercise and medication adjustment. “The medication adjustment protocol is right on the device. [Patients] never come back to the office.”
Moore reported success with the tool so far, which he attributes to its “very rich, self-reflective feedback” with added social accountability and support due to the participation of a coach. “Even if a coach provides a little support, there is a huge perception of more support.”