Dr Eleanor Perfetto Discusses the Role of Patient Engagement in Measuring Quality

Patients are becoming more engaged in their own healthcare, meaning they have more input in the quality measurement process and can even help develop quality measures for the future, said Eleanor Perfetto, PhD, senior vice president of strategic initiatives for the National Health Council.

Transcript (slightly modified)

What are some ways ACOs can listen to patients’ needs to improve quality of care?

It’s really important for patients to be involved in the quality of care and decisions about quality of care. Many of the measures that we use for quality of care today never involved patients and never asked them if those are the aspects of care that are important to them or if those are the aspects of care that represent quality to them.

I think in the future what we’re going to see is a change in the way that we measure quality. Patients being more engaged and involved in helping to figure out, what are the right kinds of quality measures that we should be looking at in order to ensure that patients are getting the quality of care that they need.

What initiatives has the National Health Council undertaken to increase patient engagement?

We’re all about patient engagement, so everything that we do and every initiative that we have is about patient engagement. A couple that I’ll tell you about are an effort that we have right now that’s going on to be sure that patient advocacy organizations and patient advocates are educated about quality of care: what does quality of care mean, what are quality measures, where do these quality measures come from.

We want them to be equipped so that they have the capacity to be engaged in the development of these quality measures, so that they can sit on committees and panels, provide their expert opinion about their disease, and really help shape those quality measures for the future.