The 2017 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference – commonly known as HiMSS –  was another huge conference that covered so much it was a bit overwhelming.  The number of presentations and vendor booths was incredible and the opportunity to review company IT offerings and network was amazing.

Population Health and Engagement were still major buzzwords at this year’s conference and I had the opportunity to review several of the population health management systems developed by major EMR companies and other vendors.

The focus of these platforms was still on registry type information with the ability to drill down for the doctor, nurse care manager or other.  This year many of the vendors highlighted their new dashboards and other graphical interfaces.  In reviewing these systems and speaking with others, we saw little evidence of user-friendly workflows or for that matter, any real attention paid to the patient.

From the patient perspective, while many of the platforms included patient portals that provided data, a communications component and some patient education – these components were not well thought out and clearly not engaging enough to sustain long term interaction.

In a population health based approach, the patient needs to be actively involved and engaged when they are not at the physician’s office. One of the components of this engagement strategy should be a portal with a solid user experience and relevant information. From years of research along with knowledge gleaned from the retail industry, we know what engages and activates people. Based on this knowledge, these portals should include a stronger focus on the look and feel of the site, the overall patient experience and flow, and leverage gamification, games and behavioral economics.

One simple way to “plug and play” these types of feature sets into the patient portal and add prescribed education to population health programs would be to integrate the EdLogics Platform.

The EdLogics platform greatly increases engagement and incentivizes interaction and learning wherever and whenever the patient is available, providing the education needed to change behaviors.

EdLogics Founder and CEO Tom Chamberlain was interviewed at HiMSS. Listen to the interview here.

Learn more about HiMSS.