The National eHealth Collaborative (NeHC) convened its second meeting of the Consumer Consortium on eHealth earlier this week, bringing together a collaborative forum of nearly 200 organizations who are working in a national effort to engage consumers around the tools and resources available to them through advances in HIT.
 
The meeting featured remarks from National Coordinator for Health IT Farzad Mostashari, MD, who briefed the group on the progress ONC has made implementing HITECH initiatives – and about the importance of patient-centeredness in all of their efforts. He highlighted milestones of a number of ONC programs and stressed the need for ONC to do more to engage patients in health IT.
 
“All too often, the patient is how we solve care coordination in this country and if we’re going to do that, we may as well give patients access to the basic information that can help them be in the center of their care,” said Mostashari. “This is what we have been doing as part of implementation of the HITECH mission, but it’s not enough.”
 
He added that "patient-centeredness should not just be baked into what we are already doing, but we need to have a focused, targeted strategy around consumer eHealth."
 
Mostashari said that, beyond hearing from members of the consortium about how to make a consumer outreach strategy most effective, he wants to work with the consortium to have an impact.
 
Senior Policy Advisor for e-Health and Co-Chair of the Consumer Consortium Steering Committee, Lygeia Ricciardi, also stressed the importance of the efforts of the Consumer Consortium on eHealth as a complement to ONC’s plans for consumer engagement.
 
“Patient engagement is a priority for ONC and we want the input of the Consumer Consortium,” said Ricciardi during her remarks. “We are really trying to reframe expectations of patients and consumers as engaged participants in health and healthcare. Healthcare does not just happen to us, it should be happening with us.”
 
The Consortium Work Groups convened after the inaugural meeting of the full consortium to begin laying the foundation for continued development of an outreach and engagement plan. The Work Groups represent four components of the development process, including inventorying information on current consumer outreach initiatives and best practices, developing content and messages to reach consumers, brainstorming outreach mechanisms and distribution systems for delivering messages, and working to leverage the work of the consortium to reach underserved communities and reduce health disparities.
 
Major themes that emerged from the Work Groups included the importance of efforts to increase health literacy as part of any consumer engagement campaign and the need for broad key messages that can be tailored to reach various stakeholder audiences, whether separated by demographics, geography or health status. The Work Groups also recognized the importance of patient and provider stories as vehicles to disseminate information related to HIT, as well leveraging the existing communication tools and strategies used by members of the Consumer Consortium.
 
“We are thrilled with the level of participation in the consortium and with the progress of the Work Groups so far,” said Kate Berry, NeHC CEO and Consortium Steering Committee co-chair. “The best news of this meeting is we have a great group of interested stakeholders who are committed to moving consumer engagement in health IT forward.  We have agreed as a group that what we can accomplish together through the consortium is much greater and more impactful that what we could do separately.”
 
In the coming months, the Consumer Consortium Work Groups plan to continue to develop specific recommendations to inform the overall engagement strategy as well as develop measures by which to gauge the success of the consortium’s efforts.

Major goals will include organizing the library compiled by the Inventory Work Group in order to create a valuable tool for ongoing efforts, articulating concepts to use in explaining the benefits of HIT to consumers, agreeing on key messages, gathering patient and provider stories, and identifying opportunities to reach various audiences. Attendees also agreed to proactively share best practices and strategies with one another so that work on consumer engagement can also be fostered outside of Consortium activities.