Enabling digital patient engagement - lessons learned from success in other sectors

Imagine if your interactions with health and care services were as easy as the rest of your digital life. Imagine if you had access to your online health record and could provide more feedback about what matters to you, knowing it would be heard and acted upon. Imagine if you could stay living at home for as long as possible, safe in the knowledge that you are being supported remotely.  Not just by your personal clinical or care team but by a network of trusted and connected digitally-enabled health and care professionals.

Patient Relationship Management 

The health and care sector has lagged behind other services in terms of providing a consistent, comprehensive digital experience for patients and social care clients.

Typically, electronic patient record systems focused on acute care and if they exist at a regional health economy level, they tend to provide a read-only view of the patient record. The focus of the legacy IT landscape has been on serving clinical and administrative staff.  

There are apps out there for GP appointment booking, repeat prescription services and some support for individual long-term conditions but these generally lack integration to primary care, provide a confusing patient experience and have performance and scalability issues. 

By providing easy to use and engaging digital platforms that people use routinely, we can start to provide the ‘Amazon’ experience to wider public services albeit in a different context.  Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have been built bottom up, with a laser focus on putting the customer at the heart of everything. 

Taking a Customer Relationship Management approach in health and using best-of -class solutions may seem alien to the healthcare context but the central ethos of treating a patient like a customer is not as strange as it might seem.

Okay, so the use of the term ‘customer’ is not usually applicable to publicly funded organisations such as the NHS (as it implies a financial relationship), but could it be re-labelled as Patient Relationship Management?

A modern CRM platform can provide the previously mentioned positive outcomes for patients via a digital platform in that:

• They provide the right digital experience to patients
• They can work across the whole community of health and care providers as well as patients and their families and carers
• They provide the ability to support personalised care plans and remote patient monitoring
• They can integrate with the systems used across health and care to provide the single view of a person, avoiding data duplication
• They can be quickly configured to meet the individual needs of health and care providers

Talk to CGI if you would like to explore this approach in more detail by contacting Tom Adams or Stuart Parsons.

Or visit our website at: https://www.cgi.com/ukHealth

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