A HITEQ Team Toolkit
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.
HITEQ Center and Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell LLP, September 2023
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s (ONC) 21st Century Cures Act Information Blocking Rule (Info Blocking Rule) prohibits covered actors – including health care providers, health IT developers of certified health IT, and health information exchanges/health information networks– from engaging in practices likely to interfere with, prevent, or materially discourage access, exchange, or use of electronic health information (EHI). The Info Blocking Rule includes eight exceptions that provide actors with certainty that, when their practice interferes with the access, exchange, or use of EHI and meets the conditions of one or more exception, such practice will not be considered information blocking. An actor’s practice that does not meet all the conditions of an exception will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis to determine whether information blocking has occurred.
Podcast written by Center for Care Innovations
Can a more advanced patient portal improve face-to-face visits? Appointments are often so jampacked with questions, screenings, and taking notes that it’s increasingly difficult to analyze patient data and provide insightful, in-the-moment guidance. Shasta Community Health Center bet that a revamp of its patient portal could enable patients to take a more active role in their care while also improving provider workflows. In this episode, we discuss how staff, patients, and other key stakeholders all collaborated on retooling and expanding this platform.
Considerations for Health Centers Selecting Tools: Remote Patient Monitoring, Electronic Patient Engagement, and mHealth Personal Apps
Although health centers have more options than ever to use electronic tools to engage patients in care, selecting those that most effectively further the goal of providing high-quality and efficient patient care is challenging. In this explainer, we consider three types of tools that health centers may invest in: Remote Patient Monitoring, Electronic Patient Engagement, and mHealth Personal Apps. By understanding what they are and how they are implemented, their advantages and disadvantages, and how they align with value-based care and the clinical workflow, health centers can choose the suite of tools that best serve their patient needs.
Published June 2021 to assist health centers in selecting a patient engagement tool.
This Excel-based scoring rubric is intended to be used by health centers to assess electronic patient engagement tools (like automated outreach SMS platforms) to determine which tool is most likely to meet the health center's needs.