Sometimes I don’t know where to post something – on e-patients.net or here. My dividing line is usually: if it’s specifically about participatory medicine, it goes there; if it’s about my views about healthcare in general as someone who goes to a lot of meetings, or specifically about patient engagement, it goes here. This one’s both; I posted it on the e-patient blog, but I want it on this archive too.
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Over on Mind The Gap, Steve Wilkins (Twitter) has a poster about patient engagement that annoyed me:-) right out of the box – because although I pretty much like everything he does, the poster starts with what I find to be the ouchiest mental disconnect in all of medicine today. But it quickly follows with the flipside. Here’s a screen grab from its top:
Gut reaction to first quote: What?? “The lack of patient engagement is the Achilles Heel of health care delivery”?? Shades of Health Leaders magazine last October, which said – in an issue on Engaging the Patient no less! –
In our annual Industry Survey, leaders cite patient noncompliance and lack of responsibility as the fifth-greatest driver of healthcare costs … a quarter of respondents pointed to patients as among the top three cost drivers, ahead of health plan overhead, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and malpractice litigation.
I love it – patient satisfaction scores are generally mediocre, 1 in 70 Medicare admissions ends in accidental death (Inspector General, Nov 2010), and the people who run these chop shops blame costs on their slacker customers. Sounds like scapegoating to me!