Dialogue Volume 10 Issue 4 2014 | Page 63

practice partner ing engagement. “Today we can be engaged in our own health without seeing a doctor, visiting a hospital or taking a prescription medication,” wrote Veronika Litinski in a recent post for MaRS (the Toronto-based innovation hub). Litinski, an investor/builder for tech-based businesses - and a former senior advisor for health care and life sciences at MaRS - calls patient engagement “the holy grail of modern health care”. She notes that health care is the top growth area for IT. Companies are scrambling to churn out fitness gadgets, produce apps, and collect and store health data, all to help us take charge of our health. Still, people not only need but want to see a doctor face-to-face. “A patient’s illness narrative may not fit squarely within a drop-down menu,” wrote Litinski. “Plus, there is also that je ne sais quoi, the almost magical element of compassion and empathy.” If, that is, it’s present. Too often, she says, “Doctors tend to equate patient engagement with patient compliance – doing exactly what the doctor told the patient to do.” Consider a situation where a patient no longer adheres to a prescription. Wilkins wrote about it, and said the cause might be a lack of trust, or more to the point, a failure of the doctor to communicate. That observation prompted a response from another doctor who absolved responsibility, commenting to Wilkins that “In the end, it is the patient’s decision to be compliant or not. Would the patient comply better with a new doctor? I doubt it.” Non-compliance isn’t merely bad patient behaviour, Wilkins countered. Instead, it’s a shared responsibility. He suggests that most patients would be likelier to comply if they understood and were on board with the need for the prescription, and believed that the benefits outweighed the risks. Did the doctor have the time or inclination to ensure that? In the back-and-forth, the docto ȁݡ