End to End Patient Engagement in Clinical Research
Complete involvement of patients in their personal healthcare is known as End-to-End Patient Engagement. In today’s world, this is primarily accomplished electronically through Patient Engagement Technology that involves hardware, software, and services. This technology is an important tool for clinical research and trials.
Patient engagement technology is a growing field and has become an extremely popular topic for discussion in healthcare industry. It is an important topic in the healthcare conferences involving healthcare physicians, health-care professionals, healthcare providers, healthcare technologists, healthcare planners, and governments. Many companies provide customized solutions to the healthcare industry.
This technology helps patients, their families, and caretakers to be involved in their self-care. It increases understanding of their health conditions, the course of treatments available and allows taking conscious and informed decisions. It increases active participation of subjects and their involvement until the end of any clinical trial. The success of any clinical trial is based on total participation of subjects through the complete trial period. A high rate of dropout is a huge deterrent for a clinical research trial.
Reasons for adopting Patient Engagement Technology
- Demand for improved healthcare
- Increasing awareness of mobile health (m-health)
- Incentives by governments for adoption of patient engagement technology
- It helps in ensuring security of patient’s personal information and data.
Patient Engagement Technology Benefits
Benefits to the Patient
- Cost reduction
- Reduction in hospital re-admission rates
- Enhanced worker productivity
- Increased patient outreach
- Improved quality of healthcare
- Increases understanding of different forms of healthcare systems
- It assists in deciding the best course of a healthcare plan.
- It encourages patients to align behavior to their prescribed healthcare plan.
- Motivate self-care based on the health-care plan.
Benefits to Organizations
For organizations, the End-to-end Patient Technology helps in quick sharing of accurate and time-sensitive information with everyone involved in the healthcare, study, research or trial. It also ensures the security of patient personal data and information.
A large portion of the population lacks health literacy and has poor access to health care. The technology has a fragmented end-user market and sometimes the security of patient data is also at stake.
These technologies require huge investments, a major deterrent for its growth. The price includes licensing fees, implementation fees, annual license maintenance fees, up-gradation and integration fees and consulting fees.
The main hindrance for End to End Patient Engagement Programs in Clinical research is the problem of awareness, trust, and understanding among the trial participants and the providers. Sometimes people show interest in a particular trial but drop out when it comes to actual participation.
However, the scenario is changing through improvements in End to End Patient Engagement programs is giving some positive results. Many organizations are trying to understand the problems, reasons, hesitations, fear, and apprehensions of patients in participating in such programs. This can be only possible by considering patient’s actual requirements. Another major factor is the follow-up. A considerable percentage of subjects drop out of any clinical study is due to an absence of follow-up. Enhancing and adding new required features will make the technology more patient-friendly.
Today organizations want patients (subjects) to participate actively instead of just expert discussions that happen to exclude the patient. Discussions with the patient’s family, friends and others who can help the patient understand the program and its benefits instead of confusing and misguiding him is a positive step in this direction.
Future Scenario
End-to-End Patient Engagement Technology has a huge potential if used effectively. This technology is an upcoming trend that will increase in the coming years.
