Engagement leading to empowerment—digital innovation strategies for patient care continuity

Abstract

Digital innovations have started to extend the value chain into the customer decision making process, enabling firms to support two major types of customer services: empowerment prior to customer purchase and engagement during and post-purchase. Service organizations such as health care firms, by virtue of their intense engagement with patients during in-patient care, have a unique opportunity to empower patients' health care choices once they become outpatients. Understanding patient ecosystems and social support networks during this engagement has important implications for the digital transformation of care-related support to reduce health care costs and also empower patients to selfmanage their health. This research uses a framework to develop alternative care support environments and, using four case studies, to develop a research agenda for digital transformation to support the empowerment of health care consumers by engaging them effectively inside the hospital.

An Agile Digital Platform to Support Population Health—A Case Study of a Digital Platform to Support Patients with Delirium Using IoT, NLP, and AI

“…Many hospitals are using community providers to address the social determinants that contribute to health inequities (e.g., supporting transportation, nutrition assistance, childcare, or education). Community health workers, peer navigators, etc., are often used to assist clients with mental health problems, sexually transmitted diseases, and diabetes [45,46]. Some social agencies leverage the support of other social agencies, particularly when delivering care-related services is complex, as in supporting homeless populations [47].…”

“…While this classification is not exhaustive, it does provide a range of services to older clients that span from self-health management to continual health monitoring in both supportive and less than supportive ecosystems [46]. Using these four different service types, Figure 1 below identifies a list of services needed to support these clients.…”

“…portive and less than supportive ecosystems [46]. Using these four different service types, Figure 1 below identifies a list of services needed to support these clients.…”

“…Web-based interventions or remote monitoring services designed to measure hemoglobin A1c or blood pressure have limited impact on client behavior without adequate training [57][58][59]. When digital services are supported by social and community health workers that provide education and answer questions, it improves their use [46,60]. When patient portals used to disseminate information are contextualized to lead clients to ask questions and seek clarification, they can prove to be of greater value [61].…”

“…The increased frequency of information gathering has been shown to improve behavioral changes among clients. For example, the realtime monitoring of glucose levels with education has been shown to improve individual adherence [46], frequent feedback on sleep quality has shown improvement for clients with apnea [65], and research is ongoing on how adaptive feedback control systems with real-time feedback can improve smoking cessation behavior [66].…”