Dr Brian MacDonald Explains How Technology Can Improve Patient Management Strategies

Transcript

How can technology be leveraged to improve upon current patient management strategies?

I think technologies can be used to enhance the current strategies we have. When we talk, traditionally, about phone-based outreach and letter campaigns via snail mail, they have a certain ceiling effect in terms of how many patients you can ultimately reach. So, leveraging technologies, whether it’s video chat or text messaging, just gives us additional avenues that we can use to try to engage with our patients and make ourselves more available.

How can this be particularly important for patients with hard-to-treat diseases?

In the case of chronic diseases and chronic conditions that might require specialty medications, adherence to those therapies and helping navigate the journey with the patient is extra important. For those patients, we want to try and make ourselves as available as possible and just meeting them wherever they’re at in their patient journey. So, if they need a long-form conversation, if they are feeling overwhelmed by how time consuming patient management programs may seem, can we shorten that via a text message or some other method of communication where we can keep in touch with them and let them know that we’re checking in on them and we care without feeling overwhelming or overbearing.

So, just giving ourselves as many options to keep in touch with patients, engage them, follow-up with them, and make sure they’re not having any issues with their therapies just helps us to monitor adherence and improve outcomes.