University of Pennsylvania PRC Director Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD, and Namita S. Mohta, MD of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, analyze the second NEJM Catalyst Insights Council Survey on Patient Engagement.

The majority of the respondents to the online survey sent in July 2016 were clinicians (53%), with executives (22%) and clinician leaders (25%) nearly evenly split.  Most describes their organizations as hospitals or health systems.

“Nearly half of respondents say their patient engagement initiatives are having a major (14%) to moderate (34%) impact on quality outcomes,” said Volpp. “That’s pretty remarkable considering we are still in the earlier stages of patient engagement and that many potential approaches have yet to be fully scaled and integrated into practice. Interestingly, clinical leaders (60%) feel more strongly than executives (47%) and clinicians (43%) that their efforts to engage patients are working.”

Volpp and Mohta note that with the shift to value-based payment models, there may be more of an imperative to design and test new ideas to engage patients between visits that will improve both cost and quality.