Showcasing the best patient engagement programs from around the world
Arundi Venkayya
Curator of EngagingPatients.org
More than six years ago, we launched EngagingPatients.org, a site dedicated to sharing best practices in patient engagement. Since then, we have shared a breadth of information from many experts and thought leaders throughout the continuum of care about the very best ways to engage patients and families. As a result, we recognized the need to showcase outstanding work that is happening all over the world in pursuit of engaging patients and families in their own care.
To that end, five years ago, we created the Sherman Awards for Excellence in Patient Engagement. These awards are presented annually at the IHI Annual Patient Safety Congress in partnership with the IHI Lucian Leape Institute.
Throughout the years, we have learned about many programs that are shifting the ways in which healthcare thinks about patient engagement. From simple solutions like Preston Memorial’s Sunday Shoes program to the more complex, data-driven University of Rochester Medical Center UR Voice program, the nominees have shown how committed they are to working with patients and families to improve engagement.
Preston Memorial Hospital: Sunday Shoes
In an effort to reduce thirty-day readmission rates among heart failure patients, Preston Memorial staff discovered that health literacy was an issue for their heart failure patients. Patients couldn’t tell for themselves when they were gaining significant amounts of fluid weight that would require treatment; some patients couldn’t afford scales, others didn’t have the ability to see or read the scales; and some weren’t able to track their weight with proper recordkeeping. The Sunday Shoes program was a simple way for patients to tell if they had gained weight. All they had to do was note if their best shoes were tighter from one weigh-in to the next.
University of Rochester Medical Center: UR Voice
UR Voice uses an NIH-funded software program called PROMIS (patient-reported outcomes measurement system) to capture patient perspectives on care. Patients take a three- to five-minute iPad survey at each of their outpatient visits. PROMIS captures patient perspectives on important indicators including their physical function, pain and mood level. The data are used for shared decision-making — specifically evaluating whether a treatment or surgery is a good choice based on their level of impairment and/or pain. It allows patients to compare their data with U.S. normative data and shows what the treatment could accomplish using predictive analytics. The team included patients in the project pilot and made changes to the program based on their input. UR Voice is being used by 550 physicians in 30 clinical programs, and to date, more than 350,000 surveys have been completed by more than 112,000 patients.
Since the creation of the Sherman Awards, we have honored several other outstanding programs. Previous award winners include Northshore LIJ (now Northwell Health), OpenNotes, Iora Health, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, MedStar Health’s Sepsis Collaborative and Dayton Children’s Hospital, among others.
We are proud of our commitment to healthcare that dates back to 1928, when John Q. Sherman, the founder of Standard Register (Taylor Healthcare’s predecessor), led a community drive to raise $1 million in thirty days to build Dayton’s Good Samaritan Hospital. We carry his legacy into our work today with a continued focus on helping healthcare organizations improve patient experience and outcomes and increase patient and family engagement.
