Patient engagement: challenges and opportunities for physicians

Interactions between patients and providers at all levels contribute to patient experience and profoundly influence patients' willingness and ability to engage with the health care system. Innovations in health care delivery, financing, and technology have created new opportunities for clinicians to enhance delivery and access to health services and information. The evolution to a more patient-centered system is not simple, but physicians will be expected to play a central role in assuring that their patients' care is coordinated across the continuum. Care delivery and preventive service are not confined to physician offices, ambulatory care clinics, and acute-care hospitals. Asthma and allergy care, treatment, and management occur in multiple settings including the home, school, and community. This provides opportunity for patients, families, and caregivers to work closely with physicians to improve their health and health care outcomes. Increased patients' participation in their own care, fueled by ongoing changes in public policy and enabled by technologic innovations, creates new opportunities for physicians to drive health care improvements and better outcomes for their patients. Physicians will want to recognize and capitalize on those opportunities. Patient organizations (such as the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America) are natural partners and collaborators. Leveraging opportunities for collaboration should improve the lives of patients with chronic illness and increase the value of the relationship between those patients and the physicians who care for them.