by Sara Parkerson, Solution Manager, SAP Labs
When I first got my Fitbit, I loved it. It let me track how many steps I took in a day, how many calories I consumed, how well I slept, and more. But over time I got bored with it, and soon I stopped using it altogether. And that experience offers a key lesson for healthcare providers.
There are a growing number of wellness 
devices on the market, from personal fitness trackers like Fitbit, Nike+ Fuelband, and Jawbone UP to wellness tools such as HealthyCloud and PinkPad. Many of these devices leverage innovative technology. And they provide an opportunity for providers such as hospitals and physician groups to engage patients and help ensure better health outcomes.
But for patient e-engagement to deliver on its promise, wellness devices will have to do more than let users record how many glasses of water they drink. Instead, healthcare providers will need to find ways to use health-management tools to truly engage patients in optimizing their own care. And they’ll need to integrate those tools with their core systems and data to ensure optimal health outcomes—and to better attract and retain customers.
Engaging change
Especially in the United States, the healthcare industry is confronting fundamental change. Increasing cost pressures, heightening patient expectations, technological change, and regulatory uncertainty are all combining to compound risk and drive industry players to experiment with new markets and models. These new realities are especially pressuring providers such as large health systems, regional community hospitals, elite academic centers, physician practice groups, and homecare and nursing-care companies.
Faced with this changing competitive landscape, providers are seeking ways to better attract and retain customers. And a key way they can do that is by getting closer to patients through e-engagement approaches such as health-management devices.
Just as important, e-engagement can help drive better health outcomes. Of course, that’s central to providers’ core mission. But it will also be increasingly necessary as both insurers and consumers push for pay-for-performance models, and as providers experiment with accountable care organizations (ACOs).
Integrating people
But providers can’t expect to simply strap a monitor to a patient’s risk and watch health outcomes improve. For health-management tools to be effective, providers need to do two things.
First, providers need to better engage patients in using health-management devices. That’s because the patients who can most benefit from the devices are often the least likely to use them. The most at-risk patients often are characterized by some combination of less education, lower income, and multiple social, age, and health challenges. These patients typically face so many distractions and impediments that they’re less able to actively manage their health.
As a consequence, providers will need to pursue programs and strategies that help them get the most from e-engagement. One way to achieve that is by also engaging family members, caregivers, or other participants in the patient’s support network.
As an example, a friend of mine recently chronicled the birth of her second child on Facebook. When the baby came prematurely, what started as a life event turned into a health situation. But by keeping her support network informed through social media, she was able to coordinate simple yet vital details like making sure her family had dinner and her older daughter had a ride home from ballet practice. It enabled my friend and her husband to stay connected, share information, and feel the love and support of their friends.
Providers could take a similar approach on a more formal basis. Many providers already offer health portals where patients can monitor their care. They might also consider establishing private social networks that would include patients’ family and friends, and where patients and providers alike could better coordinate care.
Such a social network could support patients with specific health events like a premature birth, or with ongoing wellness issues such as taking medication, monitoring glucose, quitting smoking, or maintaining a healthy diet. Of course, robust security policies and technologies would be important for protecting patient privacy.
Integrating processes
The second thing providers need to do is better integrate health-management devices with their core systems and data. For starters, there’s a rapidly growing number of devices, but there are no standards or centralized databases for accessing things like nutritional information. What’s more, as devices capture more and more data, patients and care providers can become overwhelmed with information they don’t know what to do with.
Providers will need to help patients manage and analyze that data so that patient and physician both end up with meaningful insights that lead to better health. Centralized data management will be especially important for patients seeing multiple doctors, such as a patient with diabetes who consults an internist, an endocrinologist, a dietician, a wound specialist, and more.
Just as important, providers will want to leverage the data they collect from individual devices to improve care for all patients. They can apply analytics and customer relationship management solutions to use that data to improve interactions with patients. For example, they could recognize the diseases and conditions that are most prevalent, as well as changing health patterns. They could also identify the patients who could most benefit from health-management tools and develop education and support programs to maximize their effectiveness.
I recently got a new Fitbit, which now comes in a variety of permutations and offers new functionality. I even turned on my physician to the device, who now recommends it for his patients. It helps me stay motivated to strive for my 10,000 steps a day and reach my fitness goals, and it sends me motivating messages when I’m nearing those goals. It also reminds me of how well, or not so well, I sleep.
What keeps me up at night? Knowing that patient e-engagement will have to be more than a device strapped to a patient’s wrist. To see patient e-engagement deliver on its promise, healthcare providers will need to invest in innovative applications of technology that provide tangible, ongoing value to patients. And they’ll need to integrate that technology with core systems and data in ways that help them attract and retain more customers—by providing better patient services, one step at a time.
Those are outcomes providers and patients alike will find engaging.
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