Symposium on Patient Engagement - 2012

Summary: Many patients face chronic health conditions that require sustained interaction with the health care system. The care they receive increasingly involves multiple specialists and delivery sites offering an array of diagnostic tests and treatments. Patients must assimilate information in order to make complex care decisions, and are asked to comply with specific regimens related to diet, medication, rehabilitation, wound-healing, and more. Patients are more likely to successfully manage a chronic condition if they are active partners in their own health care. Opportunities for patient engagement range from increased exchange of information and data between patients and providers, to patients becoming confident and well-informed about their own care and health behaviors. However, for patient engagement to be effective, providers must understand what the term means, appreciate how their attitudes, behaviors, and actions can increase patient involvement, and understand how they can influence the health care environment to support and respond positively to consumers.

With more than 3 million registered nurses (an average of one for every 100 Americans), nurses could be utilized to improve patient engagement. The Nursing Alliance for Quality Care (NAQC) is a national group of nursing organizations that, along with patient care advocacy organizations, are committed to advancing the quality, safety, and value of consumer-centered health care. NAQC has identified a need to study nurses’ roles and skills that foster patient engagement and create a strategic plan to enhancing nurses’ abilities to help patients assert their own values and preferences as decisions about health and health care occur. For this project, NAQC brought research, policy, and strategy elements to a national conference to gain the nursing workforce’s support to achieve national policy goals related to patient engagement in health care.

Specific Aims:

• Develop a national consensus-based white paper that will define the role of nurses in fostering consumer/patient and family engagement in every aspect of health care including decisionmaking, care coordination, and self-care management. (Achieved)
• Involve a diverse, interdisciplinary group of health professionals in a symposium and follow-on activities that will promote significant patient engagement policy research and strategy setting that will ultimately improve the patient/consumer healthcare experience. (Achieved)
• Use the symposium activities and a white paper to establish a set of consensus-based recommendations and action steps that nurses can use to facilitate patient engagement. (Achieved)

2012 Activities: The national conference was held November 12-13, 2012, with 130 registered attendees at the Dulles Hyatt in Reston, VA. Attendees evaluated the conference positively, emphasizing the quality of the speakers and the timeliness and importance of the topic. A white paper resulting from the conference underwent several revisions in 2012 and was scheduled to be presented to the NAQC board of directors in January 2013. As last self-reported in the AHRQ Research Reporting System, project progress and activities are completely on track and budget spending is on target.

Preliminary Impact and Findings: This project has no findings to date.

Target Population: General

Strategic Goal: Develop and disseminate health IT evidence and evidence-based tools to support patient-centered care, the coordination of care across transitions in care settings, and the use of electronic exchange of health information to improve quality of care.

Business Goal: Synthesis and Dissemination