Team Toolkit: Assessing Your Health Center's Digital Health Tools

Digital patient engagement investments is a broad category that includes all digital health tools your health center uses to reach and support patients. These include patient portals, messaging and outreach apps, remote patient monitoring tools, and mHealth apps. Despite the hopes and promises of new technologies, implementation of digital tools in health centers can be uneven and siloed, hindering progress on adoption, engagement, and transformation.

We know that oftentimes, leadership makes the call about what digital tools will be helpful for care teams and what to invest in. This Team Toolkit is intended to help health centers bring together stakeholders to review digital health investments and create a roadmap to move forward. The discussions outlined will help identify which team members and patients are most likely to use these tools in order to tailor implementation to those use cases. The discussions will also help determine what tools or initiatives should be maintained, expanded, or retired to best support staff and patients.

The process listed below is intentionally step-wise and may feel lengthy to more action-oriented staff. We encourage staff to commit to the entire process, as working through all of the steps is likely to uncover significant interactions between people-processes-technology that will lead to more effective uptake and ongoing use of current and future technologies.

How To Use This Resource

1. Assemble a team of health center staff who use or are impacted by digital patient engagement tools (e.g., those who assist with the tools, those who field responses related to digital outreach such as phone calls or requests, those whose patients are receiving the outreach). Your team may include clinical team members, quality team members, practice transformation team members, and front desk or call center staff.
2. Assign a role to each team member. The Discussion Sessions in Steps 1-5 will require the staff involved to assume one of two roles:
   • Facilitator: Responsible for moving this work forward; at least one facilitator is needed.
   • Participants: Tasked with providing feedback and sharing their experiences and perspectives in order to achieve the desired outcomes. Participants should be a cross section of staff who use or are impacted by the digital patient engagement tools.
3. Individual team members can complete the Pre-Session Work at their own pace.
4. Once all team members have completed the Pre-Session Work, determine the number of sessions your team will need to complete Steps 1 - 5. You may choose to engage your team in this work over one longer session, or in up to four or five shorter sessions. Each team member should be present at every session.
5. As a team, complete Steps 1 - 5. Each step contains suggested discussion topics.
6. Through this process, your team can determine what tools or initiatives should be sunset or retired while building readiness for future implementation or expansion for those tools that are still working well and creating an action plan for sustainability.
7. Upon completion of the Team Toolkit, each team member can fill out the submission form at the end of the package and you will be rewarded with a Badge! This is an official badge that is submitted by the HITEQ Center as a proof of completion to the blockchain. Your credentials can be added to profiles such as LinkedIn and verified through accreditation services such as Accredible and Open Badge.