By Tim Vaughan

Patient-centered care augmented by impactful patient engagement is a significant aspect of the modern healthcare journey. Healthcare consumers desire a care experience that reflects their personalized needs and meets their unique circumstances with a growing shift toward patients seeking an increased connection with their care team as active participants in their care. Now more than ever before, patients are selecting their healthcare partner based on desired outcomes, experience, cost, and more.

The National Academy of Medicine defines patient-centered care as "care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values, and ensures that patient values help guide clinical decisions." As this approach takes greater shape throughout the industry, healthcare decision-makers must increasingly pursue emerging technologies and facility designs that align with a more patient- and family-centered model of care. The healthcare industry can thoughtfully leverage digital advancements to achieve what patients and healthcare professionals need most.

With patient collaboration and input from de-siloed systems such as integrated electronic health records (EHR), longitudinal claims data, and psychosocial data, a healthcare team can provide more accurate and personalized care. The best patient outcomes result from tailor-made care plans based on the specific patient’s background and life circumstances. Healthcare isn’t “one size fits all.” With the right digital solutions, healthcare teams can optimize collaboration and actionable data to guarantee the best outcomes, safest environments, efficient processes, and a strong ROI.

Emerging technologies address patient needs with personalized care
Through digital transformation, healthcare leaders can make it easier for patients and clinicians to partner in achieving higher-quality outcomes. It can start with a digital front door enabling patients to find and book an appointment on their own time using a preferred device. Meanwhile, patient engagement technology provides various opportunities for customized education, data capture, and strong connections for better outcomes.

The digital journey created through an Interactive Patient Care System (IPS) is designed to put the patient and family at the center of care with integrations to the patient’s medical record. Leveraging an IPS, in-room smart television technology creates a communication hub to connect patients, clinicians, and loved ones during an episode of care. For example, integrated virtual care improves the in-patient stay by allowing patients to easily video chat with friends and family or bring remote language interpreters into the room to improve communication with the care team while also empowering staff to launch a virtual consult or rounding session into the patient room with one click from the EHR. The entertainment offerings on a patient engagement system also play a crucial role by providing a positive distraction for patients, which is shown to improve healing.

An IPS that’s integrated throughout a care journey generates a data-driven care roadmap for productive digital interactions and leverages data from the EHR to assign the right educational content to inform the patient and family of conditions, medications, and treatment options available, all in the language of their choosing. Providing each patient with the right content at the appropriate times in their journey can decrease the patient’s length of stay. Combined with post-discharge access to educational content, patients are empowered with the answers they need when they need them, which helps patients make informed decisions throughout their care journey and reduces avoidable readmissions.

Purposefully designed patient engagement systems guarantee that the patient and clinician collaborate each step of the way. This joint effort ensures that the clinician better understands each patient’s recovery goals and important healthcare history. With mutual understanding, clinicians are then able to compassionately offer recommendations that best meet the patient’s goals and realistic outcomes. This level of high-quality care is a result of collaborating with the patient, instead of providing care to the patient.

Emerging technologies address clinician well-being and satisfaction
To support both the patient and clinician, robust integrations allow added functionality with systems such as nurse call, digital rounding, environmental controls, and meal ordering to reduce administrative burden on the care team while driving operational efficiency and staff satisfaction. A McKinsey report on Nursing reveals that through technology enablement, automation, and improved delegation of tasks, there’s the potential to free up to 15% of clinician time to return to direct patient care. By automating or reassigning non-clinical care and administrative tasks to patients through an IPS system, staff are better able to allocate time, experience reduced stress, and practice at the top of their licenses, all contributing to higher job satisfaction. At the same time, patients are empowered by tackling their non-clinical needs and controlling their own comfort settings and meals.

The smart TV in the patient room becomes the focal point of an advanced IPS communication hub to better engage patients in their care while other smart tools such as digital whiteboards and digital door signs conveniently convey critical information to staff, patients, and families with real-time integrations to the EHR and other HIT systems. This system setup streamlines the delivery of care and reduces the time clinicians spend performing non-clinical and low-value, repetitive tasks such as updating dry-erase boards.

Patient-centered care is enhanced with emerging technologies
Accelerated during the pandemic, more healthcare facilities are looking toward emerging technologies to respond to patient needs with more speed and accuracy creating the hospital of the future today. Over the years, evidence has shown that patient engagement solutions are the best path forward to tailor care to the unique needs and preferences of each patient. These data-driven solutions open the door to an enhanced patient-focused experience with customized education, collaboration tools, and patient empowerment to guide toward better outcomes and improved HCAPHS scores while also increasing staff satisfaction and retention.


About the author: Tim Vaughan is the vice president, product – healthcare at pCare by Uniguest. He leads software product strategy and new product development partnerships while focusing on driving innovation for new digital patient engagement solutions. Tim joined pCare in 2019 through the acquisition of TruthPoint, where he was co-founder and CEO. He has more than 25 years of software and SaaS-industry experience.