Success in Value-Based Care Hinges on Ability to Pivot to Proactive Care

How much does the lack of patient engagement cost the U.S. healthcare system?

It’s an important question as reimbursement increasingly is tied to value-based care, leaving physicians bearing more risk.

Concise answers to that question are hard to come by, but it’s likely in the hundreds of billions of dollars in non-adherence, lack of self-management of health conditions, missed preventive care, and other factors. Consider the findings from a recent survey by Aflac: 

• 90% of Americans postpone recommended screenings and preventive visits
• Nearly 40% canceled an appointment — or didn’t schedule one at all — because of inconvenience and long waits for an available opening 

Another study found that one in three patients who reported having to complete an administrative task either delayed or gave up getting needed care because of it. 

We’re also talking about an industry that remains wedded to the fax, making matters even worse.

A recent survey of providers found that more than a third of all documents sent to medical practices are faxes, with 52% of respondents reporting that their teams had to manually process incoming faxes, such as claims, intake forms, medication records, and prior authorizations. Not surprisingly, 88% said delays from the outmoded technology negatively affect care.

Prioritizing the Patient

The bottom line is that patient engagement has been a glaring weakness of the healthcare system for a long time. Everyone has their own experiences being asked to fill out duplicative forms and experiencing a lack of coordination and information sharing between specialists and primary care providers.

Finding ways to engage patients is critical to value-based care — and quality measures like HEDIS score — because it directly correlates to patient satisfaction, appropriate and efficient utilization, and improved patient well-being. 

Patients who are engaged are more likely to self-manage their chronic conditions, adhere to medication or treatment regimes, and have a close relationship with their clinicians. Patients who are not engaged are more likely to put off needed care, lapse in adherence, and use the emergency department in a health crisis rather than visit their primary care physician for help keeping their conditions manageable. 

It’s about shifting from an episodic, reactive approach to providing care to one that prioritizes proactive and ongoing patient engagement. 

Putting Proactive Care Into Practice

BridgeInteract was purpose-built to enable this shift by automating it. Our flexible, modular build integrates seamlessly with existing EHR systems to give patients a more convenient, personalized experience at every key interaction, including appointment scheduling, registration, and billing. By providing an easy means of secure two-way messaging, it helps fill the gaps of what happens between patient visits to help providers better coordinate care, improve patient well-being, and strengthen patient satisfaction, while improving their quality of life.

It also alleviates the administrative burden of things like appointment scheduling, reminders, e-signature capture, and patient data collection for clinicians and staff. By giving patients an easier way to complete these tasks on their own time, BridgeInteract hones in on traditional frustrations of patients and neutralizes them before they spiral into complaints, further easing the burden on clinical staff.

That’s good for successfully managing risk-based contracts, ensuring you retain patients and attract new ones.

It’s what we call a return on experience, efficiency, and satisfaction – which I’ll explore in-depth next month.

If you’d like to continue the conversation with me, reach out to me here and let me know a time that works for you. I’ll be in touch!

Additional Insights

I’m also sharing some other notes from recent weeks:

• Hospital complaints jumped 79% over five years, reaching 14,500 in fiscal 2024, according to CMS, straining oversight systems and exposing growing patient frustration with care.
• The healthcare industry has the potential to save $100 billion annually via specialty-focused value-based care models, according to an industry report.
• Becker’s Behavioral Health spoke with six behavioral health leaders about the unique challenges they face in maintaining long-term patient engagement