Patient engagement is on the minds of leaders across healthcare. While Meaningful Use criteria have focused attention on the issue, there are other reasons that it will likely stay there for years to come. It turns out that better engaged patients have better outcomes, because they are more likely to follow through on appointments, medications and therapies. So providers have a really meaningful reason to stay the course on patient engagement and take the time to get it right.
Genomics, also, have been prominent in our thoughts, with the promise of more precise treatments to better fit individual physiology. Together, genomics and patient engagement have the power to transform healthcare in ways that will be good for patients, caregivers and payers.
In the weeks leading up to Healthcare IT Week, Dell thought leaders have published a number of interesting blogs on these two topics. I led off the series on September 8 with a blog in Health IT Analytics on precision medicine. Charlotte Hovet, M.D., medical director of provider consulting services for Dell, published a blog in Health IT Outcomes the day after that on the use of patient engagement tools in chronic care management. And our new medical director, Nick van Terheyden, M.D., (whom we all call Dr. Nick) had a great piece in MedCityNews on the innovative use of text messaging to engage patients in Africa.
Other healthcare thought leaders at Dell were active on other topics as well, including two excellent posts on security for mobility and for telehealth by Keith Tyson of Dell SecureWorks, published in Healthcare IT News and Health IT Security. And Paul Rosenbluth offered some useful advice on the importance of accurate data extraction for meaningful use attestation that was published in HITECH Answers.
For a continuing look at what’s happening in healthcare IT, follow us on Twitter @DellHealth. We provide links to articles of interest (including blogs by Dell leaders). You can also find us on LinkedIn.