David Muhlestein, PhD, director of research at Leavitt Partners in Salt Lake City, says a minority of patients want to be engaged with their care teams in actively managing their healthcare. The high majority — likely approaching 70 percent — want to turn their care over to their physician and have them take the reigns. The rest of patients do not want to share decisions about their healthcare with physicians at all — they prefer to decide on their own.
“ACOs are finding it’s really hard to get people engaged,” says Dr. Muhlestein. “Some are proactive or are really trying to engage patients in different ways, but they’re not particularly seeing more success than anyone else.”
What is working for ACOs’ patient engagement? What are the biggest roadblocks? As it turns out, there are several definitions of patient responsibility, high-deductible health plans are bad news for accountable care and no ACO provider will be successful on a high horse.
Seven degrees of engagement
There are numerous buzzwords for patient responsibility — patient engagement, accountability, skin in the game. It’s easy to lump these ideas together as synonymous, but Dr. Muhlestein says there are some nuances.
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