Back when I was a practicing family physician, I struggled to provide my patients with practical and useful health information and education. At the time, my only options were printed pamphlets and photocopied articles. I never knew if they ended up stuffed at the bottom of a purse, crumpled up in back pockets, or if my patients read and understood them.

Complicating matters further, my care team and nurses didn’t know what, if any, information I provided. And I didn’t know what they shared with our patients, either. We were collaborating in the dark (i.e. not collaborating).

I wanted to empower my patients, to encourage their involvement in care and promote health literacy leading to healthier behaviors, but as a budding technologist, I knew photocopies weren’t the way.

This challenge continues to ring true for doctors today, but with increased urgency, as healthcare is changing from a focus on discrete and reimbursed services like medications, procedures, and studies to more strategic patient engagement and addressing conditions with services, such as patient preparation, education, and activation.

That’s why I am happy to share that Healthwise for Care Coordination is now available on the AppExchange and natively integrated with Salesforce Health Cloud. Along with Healthwise, we created a workflow that allows care teams to share relevant videos and topics, follow-up on unopened materials, and empowers the patient to be more involved. By bringing these technologies together, we’re adding an important element of care team and patient collaboration. This is an important step toward greater patient engagement and health literacy, especially if you consider that only 12% of Americans have an adequate level of health literacy, a problem that's costing the industry an additional $73 billion annually.

We know that improving health literacy & patient participation are vital elements of quality care. When patient engagement rates increase, hospital admission and readmission rates decrease. That’s because one of the most important allies in our work for better health is the patient herself.

If you want to learn more about how we’re helping the industry abandon the photocopy and reimagine patient relationships, be sure to tune in to our webinar, “Strengthen Patient and Member Relationships,” where we show a demo of Healthwise in Health Cloud. For more details about the advantages of Health Cloud, visit salesforce.com/healthcloud

*1 National Academy on an Aging Society, 1999; White, 2008
*2 Community Health Network in Minnesota achieved a 90% patient engagement rate which led to a 40% reduction in hospital admissions and a 78% reduction in readmissions. Health IT Analytics