Patient engagement has become a major focus of health reform. However, there is limited evidence showing that increases in patient engagement are associated with improved health outcomes or lower costs. We examined the extent to which a single assessment of engagement, the Patient Activation Measure, was associated with health outcomes and costs over time, and whether changes in assessed activation were related to expected changes in outcomes and costs. We used data on adult primary care patients from a single large health care system where the Patient Activation Measure is routinely used. We found that results indicating higher activation in 2010 were associated with nine out of thirteen better health outcomes-including better clinical indicators, more healthy behaviors, and greater use of women's preventive screening tests-as well as with lower costs two years later. Changes in activation level were associated with changes in over half of the health outcomes examined, as well as costs, in the expected directions. These findings suggest that efforts to increase patient activation may help achieve key goals of health reform and that further research is warranted to examine whether the observed associations are causal.
Assessing patient activation may help to identify patients who could benefit from greater support. Such an approach may help ACOs reach population health management goals.
We explored whether supplementing a clinical risk score with a behavioral measure could improve targeting of the patients most in need of supports that reduce their risk of costly service utilization. Using data from a large health system that determines patient self-management capability using the Patient Activation Measure, we examined utilization of hospital and emergency department care by the 15 percent of patients with the highest clinical risk scores. After controlling for risk scores and placing patients within segments based on their level of activation in 2011, we found that the lower the activation level, the higher the utilization and cost of hospital services in each of the following three years. These findings demonstrate that adding a measure of patient self-management capability to a risk assessment can improve prediction of high care costs and inform actions to better meet patient needs.
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