ORLANDO—Patient engagement is not a goal, it’s a strategy, according to a lecture delivered during the Physicians’ IT Symposium ahead of the Health Information and Management Systems Society's annual conference.

Christine Bechtel, president of Bechtel Health Advisory Group and advisor for the National Partnership for Women & Families, pushed back on the idea of patient engagement as a consumerism model where providers are trying to control what consumers do.

Rather, patient engagement is “patients, families, their representatives and health professionals working in active partnership at various levels across the healthcare system--direct care, organizational design and governance, and policy making--to improve health and healthcare,” said Bechtel, quoting from an article she co-authored last year for Health Affairs.

There is a continuum of engagement that includes consultation, involvement and shared leadership, she explained. For designing online access to health information, this could take the form of user testing (consultation), feedback from patients on experience (involvement) and, finally, implementation and evaluation (shared leadership). Another example provided by Bechtel was the formation of privacy policies, where surveys and other forms of feedback from patients would be used to write new policy.

“Patients can absolutely help, if you let them,” she said.

With so much investment in health IT in recent years, some may wonder if providers build these systems, will patients actually use and benefit from them? To help answer that question, Bechtel shared results from a 2012 survey of 2,000 patients conducted by the National Partnership for Women & Families. That survey found that patients whose providers used an EHR thought the technology allowed doctors to deliver better care than those who relied on paper records. Patients felt the EHR helped doctors better keep up with a medical history, have timely access to relevant information and helped avoid errors and unnecessary testing.

Hispanic adults in particular rated EHRs as useful for helping understand health conditions and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

The survey should also ease the fears of providers who are concerned about meeting the 5 percent usage threshold for online access to health information that’s part of Meaningful Use Stage 2. Nearly one-quarter of those surveyed had online access to care and 80 percent of those patients used it at least once, and nearly half said they used it multiple times per year. Online users were even more enthusiastic than general EHR respondents in saying the technology helped them engage in their healthcare and kept them well informed. “They trusted their doctors more, frankly,” said Bechtel.

As for wondering if providers build it, will patients come, Bechtel tweaked the original question. “If you build it with them,” she said, “they will already be there.”