Each week I take an hour to join with a few colleagues and thought-leaders around the world on twitter to discuss all kinds of interesting topics related to where healthcare is going, what to expect in the intersection between Health and Technology, and how we might play a role in that changing landscape. These TweetChats are an opportunity to learn, share, and ultimately understand how social media, technology, and the role of various players in the healthcare world might better work together. Often, we turn to the topic of patient engagement. This is focused on what tools, technology, and other needs might help to get patients more involved in their own health. This can come in the form of tracking various metrics (see the Quantified Self movement) to making sure that individuals on medication are staying on top of that treatment to ensure their continued health improvement. While in our last TweetChat, which emphasized Patient Engagement and Experience specifically. We discussed that it was important for us to focus on what the patient could do, yes, but also what the provider and the payer could do. This is a common picture of the players in the healthcare world. Someone needs the service (patient), someone provides the service (provider), and someone pays for the service (payer). It looks sort of like this:
But that’s not really the whole picture, now is it? The truth is that this is the model of a sick-care system. As I’ve mentioned in blog postings beforehand, in order to keep people as healthy as possible before they need to access the healthcare system, the system must account for one more “P” in this proverbial puzzle (or pie, if you’d like!); one’s Peers:
It’s the convergence of all four P’s (Provider, Payer, Patient, and that Patient’s Peers) that will allow for greater healthcare reach. When the Payer and the Provider are able to engage the Patient’s Peers, then true health generation is possible and the benefits of one’s social network can then be fully leveraged.
With that, I submit a new hashtag for the consideration of a community that continually strives to make the very complicated healthcare system a little simpler as we move towards greater total health and wellbeing of the individuals that have to access this system. #4PHealth represents the four core stakeholders in healthcare that ultimately are responsible for the health of the patient and responsible for keeping that patient out of the hospital, involved and engaged in their total health and wellbeing, and always striving to improve one’s total health picture. When the Patient, Provider, Payer, and Peers come together, total wellbeing is possible.
This doesn’t have to be limited to the TwitterSphere, though. Take a moment and think about the real-world applications of this for you in your life. What can you be doing to help those in your peer group become healthier? What opportunities are there for you to help generate greater health for yourself and for your friends, family, and coworkers? What can you ask of your peers to help you with to create better health for yourself? The 4P model may not be the easiest thing for us to accomplish in our current healthcare system given the disjointed nature of care models, but you still have the ability to start working on the fourth “P” today. What will your first step be?
To our health,
Ryan Lucas
Supervisor, Marketing
(illustrations assembled myself!)
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