Preventative healthcare  is the practice of taking measures to prevent the development of acute and chronic disease. With rates of chronic disease on the rise within our country, implementing preventative health measures within our healthcare systems allows practitioners to stop the onset of any disease for their patients. However, preventative healthcare  requires different strategies and methods than managing an already present chronic disease. 

Preventative healthcare  may require lifestyle changes, health education, and other counseling strategies that must be adaptable to a patient’s current habits, culture, and day-to-day life. This is where technology and healthcare unite. Adding technology to your preventative medicine strategy can be extremely beneficial, because of the way it allows you to increase the number of touchpoints you have with each patient, as well as track crucial data on patient outcomes. 

Benefits of health technology in preventative healthcare

✓ Supports value-based care initiatives

Many practitioners are beginning to implement a value-based approach to care, which means they are reimbursed based on their patients’ health outcomes, rather than by each service provided. Patients, therefore, see lower healthcare costs and providers improve patient satisfaction due to improved patient conditions.  

Leveraging health technology in preventative healthcare helps support these value-based care initiatives that are going to become the norm in medical reimbursement. Technology efforts, such as patient engagement between appointments, helps improve patient outcomes and allows providers to collect crucial data when looking to prevent chronic disease in their patients. Patients can log metrics, message providers for support, access educational resources, and more.   

✓Increases patient retention and frequency of care

Every chance you engage with a patient is another chance to build your relationship.  The more consistent touchpoints occur, the more face-to-face time you get to learn about your patient and their goals for working together. This is another great opportunity to incorporate technology into healthcare. A comprehensive patient engagement software will give you the ability to communicate with your patients through the platform. Preventative healthcare, as we mentioned before, relies on the implementation of lifestyle changes, which can best be supported through telehealth and patient engagement efforts. 

With Healthie’s Client Engagement Portal, you can establish wellness goals for clients to track on a daily, weekly, and long-term basis with customizable client notifications/reminders.

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Ways to incorporate health technology into your practice

✓Offer patient engagement between appointments

Patient engagement is a general term used to describe patients actively participating in their own health and wellness. This is especially important in preventative healthcare. In lieu of providing one-directional healthcare recommendations, implementing a patient-engagement strategy allows healthcare professionals to receive input (and information) from patients and to work collaboratively to create a wellness plan. In a two-way flow of information, healthcare providers are able to provide personalized care, and patients are more likely to adhere to these recommendations. Nowadays, many EHR and practice management platforms offer patient engagement suites providers can leverage to provide even higher quality care to their patients. 

✓Use wearable technology

Big data in healthcare doesn’t always have to be so difficult to obtain. Wearable trackers offer another way for providers to connect with their wellness clients, by adding another medium of client engagement.  With syncing capabilities, providers can easily check in on client progress each day, offering feedback and motivation.  Being able to see daily progress, especially from metrics not usually tracked by wellness professionals, allows providers to have a more comprehensive view of a client’s journey when working with them.  The extra data from wearables  gives providers the ability to personalize wellness goals, so they are realistic and achievable for clients.  
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✓See patients via telehealth

Telehealth gives you the ability to hold sessions with your patients virtually. Being able to hold appointments online allows flexibility,is much more convenient for your patients and can assist in preventative healthcare.  If patients need to cancel, ask if they would be willing to have your appointment through video chat.  This way, you can still have a productive check-in with your patient, and avoid set-backs that would have come about from missing an appointment.  

Healthie’s Plus, Group, and Enterprise levels all integrate with HIPAA-compliant Zoom.

✓Track KPIs and create data reports

Big data in healthcare starts with Key Performance Indicators. Better known as KPIs, they are metrics that are used to measure the success of a business’ goals and objectives over a period of time. In the case of preventative healthcare, KPIs can include patient data that demonstrates improved health outcomes over a period of time. You can demonstrate to clients and stakeholders alike that your preventative medicine strategy is working, by providing real, measurable data. Many EHR and patient engagement platforms will automatically collect data for you, and generate reports and dashboards so you can view and analyze KPI data. 

How Healthie can support preventative healthcare measures through health technology

With the rise of value-based care, preventative healthcare is only going to become a more common strategy for providers to employ in order to achieve the best outcomes for their patients. The hope is that preventative healthcare will help our healthcare system make the transition from making profits off of treating acute and chronic disease, to being incentivized to prevent these diseases.

Healthie’s telehealth and patient engagement platform can support your preventative healthcare efforts by allowing you to maintain contact with patients between appointments, allowing for a strong rapport and improved patient outcomes. 

When you work with patients via Healthie, you gain:

• A comprehensive patient engagement suite, including journaling, metrics tracking, goal setting, HIPAA-compliant chat, Care Plans, and more
• A HIPAA-Compliant telehealth platform to host individual and group appointments
• EHR and intake form library to store patient information 
• Reporting and analytics capabilities to track KPIs
• And more