5 Ways To Boost Patient Self-Management of Care

Most clinicians agree that if patients took more personal responsibility for their health, we'd have a healthier society and lower costs. But, what is the responsibility of clinicians to promote self-care? And, do we promote and encourage it...or do we subliminally create barriers and obstacles for patients? Do we really want them to be empowered...or not?

What will it take to help people help themselves when it comes to their health?  This will be the theme of an upcoming keynote presentation I am doing at the Dorland Health's Care Coordination Summit in Las Vegas on March 8, 2011.  As usual, I will be pushing the envelope and challenging the audience to re-define the definition of "care"--what it is, where it is delivered, and who delivers it.

As a preview to the event, the following article was published by Dorland Health....

5 Ways To Boost Patient Self-Management of Care
By Richard Scott
February 15, 2011

With the emergence of patient-centered care comes the express need for patients to move into an active role and take ownership of their care – an increasingly crucial characteristic to success. Yet propelling patients into this position of empowerment can be a tall task. What are the best ways to effect positive self-change in individuals?

We posed the question to healthcare consultant Dr. Archelle Georgiou, founder of Georgiou Consulting who will deliver a presentation titled Help People Help Themselves at the Care Coordination Summit on March 8 in Las Vegas. Dr. Georgiou offered the following tips to thrust patients into greater control of their health and healthcare.

Look past the condition. If this list of advice can be summarily divided into two parts – one oriented to how the healthcare practitioner approaches the patient and the other focused on a patient’s own recognition of care ownership – this first point falls into the former category. “The starting point is for the clinician to recognize that you’re dealing with the wholeness of the person and not just the condition,” says Georgiou.

While clinical skill is ever-important, the initial – and continuing – approach to how a physician or other member of the treatment team views a patient perhaps has more to do with good outcomes than clinical skill alone by engaging the patient in their own care from the outset. Only positive things will come out of that approach.

Look past clinical skill alone. Expanding on the above area, it is important to further engagement with the patient’s complete mind-body dynamic. This means more than relying on top-rated medication or surgical interventions or other evidence-based approaches. It’s key to focus on “marrying that with some things we forget to incorporate into a treatment plan, like mind-body medicine, relaxation techniques, stress [management] techniques,” says Georgiou. “It’s one thing to give a pill for anxiety. And it’s another to engage someone and empower them to do meditation-based stress reduction.”

Bolster communication. A two-part strategy, effective communication involves open discourse between both the treating team members and the team and the patient. “We have a culture that in some ways has encouraged patients to be passive about their own health,” says Georgiou. “Part of it is the communication that clinicians expect and give permission to patients to take charge of their own health.”

Expand your knowledge base. As patients feel more comfortable taking charge of their health, it is incumbent on them to become aware of their general health status and their treatment plan. In owning their treatment, patients can create personal health records or be knowledgeable about their office-based electronic medical records (if they exist). Of course, in many cases a clinician’s overall approach to how they deliver care (see the first two points) will go a long way toward deciding how engaged a patient will be.

Open up new lines of knowledge acquisition. The immediacy of information-sharing today means that there are many avenues patients can use to acquire information about their illness or treatment plan. According to Georgiou, social networks – online medical sites and discussion forums, for instance – are a vastly underused resource. “There’s a whole other sphere to where people can receive care, advice and support that clinicians typically don’t tap into,” she says.

With the care landscape changing, the most advanced clinicians and their teams will need to adapt to new ways of delivering medicine – not simply to keep pace but to remain ahead of the game.