Patient-Generated Health Data: How to Improve Patient Care

As a healthcare professional, we know you are always looking for ways to provide better care. To truly improve the quality of patient care that your team delivers—and, ultimately, boost your bottom line—patient-generated health data (PGHD) is a great place to start. PGHD—or health records comprised of data gathered by or for patients—can help healthcare providers personalize the patient’s care experience to suit their needs.
The top priorities for any healthcare organization are to get the best outcomes for patients and to succeed. These two goals, of course, go hand in hand. Implementing a data-fueled, patient-centered approach will help you achieve significant results in your practice, both for your patients and for your team.

Use patient-reported outcomes to improve value-based care reimbursements

When it comes to the value-based care model, knowing the outcomes of patient care will help you improve value-based reimbursement from risk-sharing agreements. The healthcare industry has begun to move away from a model that only treats the patient when something is wrong, runs unnecessary tests, or uses more resources than necessary for billing purposes. Now, teams are focused more on preventing illness or injury by providing holistic, proactive, long-term care.

Patient-generated health data can help improve outcomes

This improved, results-based approach prioritizes quality over quantity. Past outcomes can inform your future care plans and create a solid framework of how to care for a patient so you don’t have to start over every time they schedule an appointment.

Use PGHD to refine informed and shared decision-making in order to help healthcare providers move the quality of patient care forward. When you help your patients and team use the right data, outcomes can improve because care interactions are built on efficiency, authenticity, accuracy, and comprehensiveness—rather than due diligence or simply “going through the motions.” The patient-generated health data you gather can help you get a sense of how patients are doing between visits, biometric data, their health history, and any lifestyle habits that could be affecting their health.

Patient-generated health data can provide continuity between care providers with shared data

Clinical data can also be used to improve care team coordination and how patients are approaching specific health risks, such as chronic conditions. Rather than asking a patient to provide personalized information during each visit, keeping digital records of PGHD in one convenient location—such as a Patient Relationship Management software (PRM) program—can help clinicians better understand and treat the individual.

Care professionals pick up where care was last left off and learn more each time they see a patient. With this garnered information about patients, care teams can increase improvements and eliminate old practices that repeat mistakes or allow inefficiencies.

Use patient-generated health data to keep track of patient and team conversations

Patients want to be treated as people—thus, you will want to consider not only their physical health outcomes but their feelings, as well. This human connection is critical and helps you understand how your patients think and feel, ultimately helping you elevate the care your facility provides. Each conversation with a patient should feel like a true conversation, which can be difficult if you don’t have a way to keep track of interactions and share conversation history among your staff.

Staying on top of patient engagement will also help keep things organized and streamlined and ensure processes and protocols always move smoothly and seamlessly. Collect any information the patient provides and create a report that lives in a PRM so that it is easily accessible. Use these data reports to keep track of conversations between your care team and patients.

This method will help prevent patients from falling through the cracks and feeling as though their voices are not being heard. They want a say in their health and need someone to listen, take notes, and provide actionable advice.

Use patient-generated health data to improve patient satisfaction

Information that comes directly from the patient—whether in the form of patient-generated clinical data, patient satisfaction reports, or conversations during appointments—provides valuable insight into what your organization is doing well and where it could use improvement.

Patient satisfaction reports

With patient satisfaction reports, you can be sure your care team is prioritizing each patient’s main concerns and needs. They also give insight into where change may be needed. All organizations can greatly benefit from measuring results—but this step is especially critical in healthcare because you’re dealing with people’s well-being. You need to examine data to know what kind of outcomes you’re getting so you understand how to improve. It’s of the utmost importance you look at not only at what you’re doing right, but what you may be doing wrong.

Look for gaps in care and adjust accordingly

Again, the only way to see progress is to identify areas that need improvement. You need a bird’s-eye view to be able to zero in on specifics and enact change. These valuable patient-generated health data and reports should serve as your jumping-off point when you are looking for a strategy to make things better. Use this powerful health information to bolster your brand so your patients choose to come back to you for their healthcare needs. You won’t know what to fix if you don’t ask—and utilizing this practice is an immensely helpful tool that enables you to do just that.

Make your program more care-centric with patient-generated health data

If all of these tactics sound like good ideas to you, but you don’t know how to implement them, turn to Welkin Health for a Care Management system like no other. The right technology will be your best friend in the quest for amazing, patient-centered care. Request a free demo NOW to learn about a software program that facilitates all the solutions you read about in this article today.

During your individualized demo with an expert Welkin software representative, you will get to see a glimpse of how this innovative tool can help you protect your organization from making mistakes, minimize employee burnout or turnover, improve patient satisfaction, and reduce lost time and funds. All the patient-generated health data you could need is securely gathered and conveniently stored in one sophisticated yet user-friendly location.