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