Introduction
Effective communication between patients and healthcare providers is essential, yet often challenging. In many healthcare settings, patients and providers are unfamiliar with each other, making it difficult to deliver truly personalized care. This challenge is further compounded for providers who lack access to key patient information, limiting their ability to offer high-quality services.
Traditional Electronic Health Records (EHRs) do not include Patient Contextual Data (PCD) such as health values, individual characteristics, patient experience data, and social factors that are important in the management of the patient.
It is crucial to incorporate the use of structured approaches for the collection of pre-visit contextual data and real-time patient data in order to tackle these gaps and enhance the patient-provider interactions and health equity.
The Importance of Contextual Data in Healthcare
The health determinants show that clinical care accounts for 20% of a patient’s health, which means that other factors are key contributors to a patient’s health. Lack of a systematic way of collecting PCD and patient insights leaves the healthcare providers having incomplete patient details, which may result in incorrect management of the patient, reduced patient participation in the management of their health, and proper communication during the visit.
A Recent Examination of Pre-Visit Contextual Data Collection
A randomized controlled trial evaluated a digital tool, the PatientWisdom website, designed to gather and summarize pre-visit contextual data. Functioning as a digital health research platform, the tool demonstrated that incorporating contextual data and real-time health insights can significantly improve communication between patients and providers. The patients who used this PCD tool actively reported that they had a better experience in important communication aspects such as:
- How well did your providers treat you?
- Did the providers pay attention to your questions and concerns?
- Did the providers care about you and your health?
- Length and quality of the visits?
These enhancements were sustained across various patient racial categories, suggesting that the application of such tools does not necessarily increase health inequalities.
However, while communication was improved considerably, patient activation, which is the patient’s awareness, capacity, and courage to manage their health, was not boosted by the PCD tool to a statistically significant degree.
Recommendations for the Use of Pre-Visit Contextual Data Tools in Practice
Organizations that want to enhance patient-provider communication through the use of pre-visit contextual data and patient insights should:
Facilitated Enrollment Strategies
Proactive outreach by clinical teams or coordinators increases patient uptake of contextual data collection tools, especially when supported by healthcare decision support tools that guide clinical workflows. Patients’ participation and tool uptake can be improved through direct contact and reminders by telephone and other means.
Integration with Existing EHR Systems
Proper PCD tools should be compatible with current EHR systems to ensure that the patient information is easily accessible and used by the healthcare providers at the point of contact.
Human-Centered Design
The tools should be simple, easy to use, and understandable and should follow the principles of health literacy and patient engagement to ensure that more patients, especially those from vulnerable populations, can use them.
Provider Training and Engagement
Healthcare organizations should ensure that providers are empowered to use contextual data and healthcare data analytics when developing treatment and care plans. The use of healthcare decision support tools, especially when integrated with Electronic Health Records (EHRs), can further enhance the efficiency and quality of care delivery.
Potential Inequalities
The use of technology in healthcare is not without some consequences that may worsen existing inequalities in access to care; this study found no such negative impact across the racial categories. To sustain equity, healthcare organizations should:
It is crucial to ensure equal access and involvement of all population groups in the use of telemedicine services:
Conclusion
The use of pre-visit contextual data collection and mobile health data collection indeed enhances patient-provider communication positively, as seen in the previous findings.
Although there was no statistically significant change in patient activation or patient-reported outcomes, the large enhancement in the relational aspects of care suggests that more such tools should be adopted to complement existing patient-reported outcomes tracking mechanisms for longitudinal care improvement.
It is, therefore, important that healthcare organizations work to incorporate systematic, digital collection of contextual data into usual care to improve the quality of care and equity.