August 2, 2024
At OCHIN, we understand that practice transformation must be both data-driven and human-centered. Our practice coaches partner with member clinics to ensure that care delivery is centered around the patients they serve by elevating patient voices and directly engaging with patients, families, and caregivers.
Patient advisors are a diverse and representative group of patients, family members, or caregivers who enjoy giving feedback and contributing to improvements in care delivery. They provide unique perspectives based on their experiences as patients or caregivers, making them important partners to providers and staff in ensuring the safety, quality, and positive experience of care for patients. When multiple patient advisors and providers collaborate to advance best practices and integrate patient voices into the development and shaping of programs, services, and initiatives, this collaboration is called a Patient Family Advisory Council (PFAC).
OCHIN facilitates a quarterly discussion on effectively partnering with patients to improve care, with a particular focus on PFACs. These discussions support information sharing and peer learning, encourage the use of patient-facing OCHIN Epic tools, and highlight best practices in partnering with patients. Oyinkansola “Bukky” Ogunrinde, a senior practice coach at OCHIN, provided insights into these discussions and their role in supporting culturally responsive care through shared learning and innovation.
Why is patient representation and partnership important to transforming community health and well-being?
Patient representation and partnership is crucial to transforming community health for several key reasons.
Because they live in the community being served, patient and family advisors can provide valuable firsthand insights into the specific health-related needs, health care delivery challenges, social health needs, sociodemographic factors, and cultural dimensions that affect their communities.
Patient insights help identify areas that require improvement and develop comprehensive health strategies, along with tailored, culturally sensitive, whole-person health interventions that are more likely to be effective.
In addition, patients’ knowledge and experience with the health care delivery system gives them a unique perspective that allows them to pinpoint challenges and barriers that may not be visible to providers, thus helping to refine and enhance care delivery. Patient partnerships highlight the importance of addressing health disparities, shedding light on inequities and driving efforts to ensure all community members have equitable access to quality, affordable, patient-centered care.
Patient partnerships also build trust and engagement by encouraging patients to take an active role in their own health and the health of their community, which can lead to more successful health interventions, higher levels of patient satisfaction, and better health outcomes.
Establishing patient advisory groups can be challenging for any health center that may be limited in resources, capacity, and time. However, patient partnerships can lead to significant improvements that help address these issues, yielding benefits in terms of improved safety, engagement, and satisfaction of both patients and staff. Patient advisors are uniquely positioned to support effective population health management practices, provide valuable feedback for process optimization to reduce clinician and care team burnout, inform proper allocation of resources for cost-effective care, and facilitate the advancement of the quintuple aim of health care transformation.
How do quarterly discussions focused on patient voices help drive member learning and quality improvement?
OCHIN’s quarterly member discussions help build community partnerships and provide a focused opportunity to examine the value of patients as partners in the design and improvement of care through team collaboration. These discussions help members learn from each other and gain valuable insights, such as improved patient engagement through MyChart patient portal surveys.
As a practice coach championing the transformation to value-based care at OCHIN, I understand the importance of patient partnerships in driving sustainable change. These partnerships provide an opportunity to leverage real-time feedback to inform the planning, delivery, and evaluation of care. In turn, this feedback enhances communication, identifies barriers, informs staff training and development, guides decision-making, supports continuous improvement, and helps identify best practices. Additionally, it sparks innovative ideas for improving care delivery and serves as a valuable metric for measuring the impact of quality improvement initiatives.
Much like the value of hearing directly from patients, the most persuasive discussions are those that spotlight the work of individual members and provide real-life examples of patient advisors’ impact on problem-solving. These sessions provide a space for relatable and actionable peer-to-peer learning.
For example, the first collaborative member spotlight featured Kevin Vandenheuvel, a family practice physician assistant and patient experience director from Winding Waters Health Clinic. He shared the health center’s journey to establishing a PFAC, offering candid reflections on their successes, challenges, and future plans.
What topics are covered?
We’ve covered a range of topics related to elevating patient voices, including an overview and benefits of patient advisors and PFACs. Future topics will include steps to forming a sustainable PFAC, particularly in community or Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). These steps include assessing organizational readiness, securing executive leadership support, and planning to work with a patient council, which involves chartering, structuring, and other logistics.
We will also discuss how to:
- Build partnerships that align the expertise of patients’ lived experience with quality improvement goals, thus enabling more equitable outcomes
- Prepare leadership, clinicians, and staff for engagement with patient advisors
- Recruit partners
- Implement patient advisory activities
- Track the results of collaboration
- Celebrate the success of partnerships
How does this consultative support help OCHIN network members drive health equity?
This consultative support helps our members drive health equity by advancing patient representation and partnership to improve patient outcomes through connected, whole-patient care. We do this by supporting care teams with comprehensive technical and consultative support focused on storytelling, step-by-step guidance for planning and development, highlighting promising practices from literature and reputable professional organizations, spotlighting OCHIN network members who are actively doing the work, and following up on probing questions that arise during the discussions.
The Patient Voices Quarterly Focused Discussions will continually underscore the importance of this topic in patient-centered care delivery transformation. Involving patient representatives and fostering partnerships within the community ensures that health care strategies are more inclusive, targeted, appropriate, effective, and sustainable. This approach ultimately leads to better, more equitable health outcomes and stronger communities.
Read the first installment of our practice coaching Q&A series to learn how OCHIN supports whole-patient care by improving social risk screening.
