Patient Engagement Growing Focus for Hospitals

Engaging patients more effectively in their own treatment is becoming a growing focus for hospitals and hospitalists. The Wall Street Journal earlier this year described how hospitals are scoring patients on their “activation”—how engaged they are likely to be in their ongoing care and recovery—with measurement tools such as the Patient Activation Measure (www.insigniahealth.com/solutions/patient-activation-measure)—in order to customize their care through special coaching or other interventions.⁴ Information Week Healthcare notes that more hospitals are putting patient experience officers in the C-suite to help them learn how to treat patients more like valued customers.⁵

One of the country’s first chief experience officers (CXOs), James Merlino, MD, CXO for Cleveland Clinic, heads a department that hosts the annual Patient Experience Summit, which was held in Cleveland in May with co-sponsorship by the Society for Hospital Medicine and the American Hospital Association. It’s one thing to talk about how important patient experience is, Dr. Merlino told Information Week Healthcare. “But it’s another to hold people accountable for it.”

Larry Beresford is a freelance writer in Alameda, Calif.

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