Explore Patient Experience Through the Lens of Consumers & Caregivers at HIMSS21

The 2021 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition will take a deep dive into highly vetted education sessions within 17 topic categories, including Consumers, Caregiver and Patient Experience.

HIMSS21 Patient Experience sessions will examine tools, technologies, programs and strategies designed to embrace consumers (patients and their families) in becoming active partners with providers and other professionals in managing their health and wellness. Explore tools that encourage healthy behaviors, help patients manage their conditions and enable patients and their families to be partners with clinicians in making appropriate healthcare decisions.

RELATED: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Thought Leadership at HIMSS21

Consumers, Caregiver & Patient Experience Sessions

In-person programming includes highly vetted sessions from industry leaders and specialty, niche programs to meet distinct needs. HIMSS is at the forefront covering cutting edge topics impacting the health IT ecosystem.

Tuesday, August 10

Extending the Medical Home With a Single Digital Platform: 10 a.m. - 11 a.m.

This session will explain how health systems can leverage existing technology to improve care and cost-efficiency for difficult-to-treat patients. Show how to align clinicians and patient-families in discovering solutions and designing optimal technology. Demonstrate how to integrate platforms and select vendors to develop a tool that changes care management in an effective and measurable way.

Fostering Innovation With Real-Time Communications: 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

This session will focus on the execution of a web-based intraoperative communication system across the health network, along with a review of the data since implementation. The speakers will describe how to expand the use of technology to significantly improve the perioperative experience and patient satisfaction for patients and families in their hospitals.

Transforming Lives With Pediatric Remote Monitoring: 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Learn how UVA was able to develop, implement and produce dramatic results in only nine months. Pediatric remote monitoring has radically changed how care is delivered for children, parents, and providers at the University of Virginia Hospital (UVA). The ability to send infants and children home to be monitored for care has radically transformed care delivery and improved outcomes.

Genesis: A Consumer Informatics approach to Pre-eclampsia in African-American Mothers: 12 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.

This poster will be displayed in conjunction with the HIMSS21 Career Fair. Pre-eclampsia is considered one of the most preventable causes of maternal deaths but is responsible for approximately 20% of maternal deaths. Of that 20%, African American mothers are considered an at-risk group as the rates among the races are largely disproportionate and just being African American is considered a risk-factor. This poster will open the discussion and identify some of the racial health disparities associated with pre-eclampsia and apply to related fields.

Streamlining the Drive Thru Experience: 12 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.

This poster will be displayed in conjunction with the HIMSS21 Career Fair. Pharmacies wouldn’t survive without having some kind of system in place to help patients track their prescriptions like an automated phone system, websites or smart phone app. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of having a drive thru and giving patients direct access to their profiles to make requests, input insurance changes without going through pharmacy staff or current adherence programs.

Delivering on the Person-Centric Connected Health Platform: 2:45 p.m. - 3:45 p.m.

In this presentation, leaders of a large Midwestern integrated health system describe how the pandemic accelerated and expanded implementation of a first-of-its-kind digital health platform. Provided free to community members, the platform and app enables patients and their family members to become active partners with providers in managing their health and gives them accurate tools and information on COVID-19 while turbocharging the health system’s overall population health strategy. Presenters will also describe how the app was quickly customized to provide COVID-19 symptom checking, triage and tracking to ensure patients and staff are protected.

Capturing Senior Loyalty: Blending IT With a Human Touch: 4 p.m. - 5 p.m.

This session explains how to mine the robust customer databases available to the health system to determine value. Discover the customer personas from the database that would benefit from a loyalty group, including those most at risk. Prepare key return on investments (ROIs) that are ideal for the business to engage customers better, with bridges to CIO, CEO and CFO business goals. Create three to five key concepts for testing and core needs assessment to expand in the customer loyalty program.

Wednesday, August 11

Digital Driving Patient Experience in Women’s Health: 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

This session will outline best practices for improving the patient experience through timely content, illustrate ways provider workflow integration encourages widespread usage and evaluate how tools and materials are performing through analytics.

Five Ways SMS Marketing Can Help Your Healthcare Practice: 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Join us in this session as we discuss 5 key ways SMS marketing can help you attract new patients, retain current patients, and improve overall patient engagement. In this session, you’ll learn how to: Maximize your opt-in list Implement key insights into your SMS marketing plan Engage via text at every stage of the patient journey.

End-of-Life Care: Helping Patients Make Tough Decisions: 1 p.m. - 2 p.m.

Patients want care through the end of life that aligns with their personal values and preferences. This is especially important when patients cannot communicate wishes for themselves, making an advance directive a crucial element of care. This session will identify target patients for receiving information in advance of their appointment, design patient behavior to return the information and drive engagement, evaluate communication methods and materials that are most effective and create outreach based on utilization.

Conversational Context: The Future of Patient Engagement: 1:15 p.m. - 2:15 p.m.

In this session, you will hear examples of how a comprehensive health engagement strategy that is proactive and participatory can yield real results in bringing health delivery back to its core purpose: improving outcomes by addressing the true drivers of good health. The key ingredient is in developing an ongoing relationship with your health consumers and putting the resulting conversational context to work towards ongoing improvement in your healthcare delivery strategies.

Aging With Attitude: 4 p.m. - 5 p.m.

This session will share the research findings on how seniors age with attitude and their views on creating aging solutions, showcase how designing for the aging experience is an imperative with the AX (aging experience) design approach for solving problems, and demonstrate how to use advanced technologies such as sensors, artificial intelligence (machine learning), vision, and voice to help people age with attitude.

Driving to Value in the Post COVID Era Thru Patient Engagement and Care Access: 4 p.m. - 5 p.m.

In this session, you’ll hear from consumers — what they want and need, through the results of our annual healthcare industry survey. You’ll also hear operational success stories featuring simplified care navigation and personalized engagement which result in improved health access and better health and business outcomes.

iChoose: The Patient's Choice: 4 p.m. - 5 p.m.

This session looks at how incorporating patients into the decision-making process empowers patients, drives end-user engagement and increases patient satisfaction. Using Coordinated Behavioral Care’s (CBC’s) iChoose event as a case study, this event incorporated the patient’s voice by allowing mental health patients to vote on the app they want to use. Our speakers share data on emerging technologies and explore how providers can meaningfully incorporate consumer choice in healthcare as part of their strategic plans by using events like iChoose. 

Improving Adherence With Technology and Pharmacy Benefits: 4 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.

This session explains how strengthening technology with pharmacy benefits can improve patient engagement and medication adherence. The speaker will illustrate how advanced analytics help educate a personalized approach to care management that ultimately helps to improve outcomes and lower overall costs.

Thursday, August 12

More Than Medicine: Improving Pediatric Adherence: 10 a.m. - 11 a.m.

Anxiety related to medical procedures can cause delays and nonadherence to protocols among pediatric patients. And for good reason. These procedures involve outsized equipment and unfamiliar environments. Attendees will learn about a new, state-of-the-art program that uses behavioral economics to increase adherence to complex medical procedures.

Are We There Yet? Engagement From the Patient Perspective: 2:30 p.m. - 3 p.m.

Learn the easy fixes that every healthcare system and vendor should be making to improve patient engagement, improve outcomes, increase revenue, and understand opportunities for digital health to support patients with chronic conditions that include cognitive and behavioral challenges. This speaker was a partner in a management consulting firm leading its healthcare information technology (HCIT) practice when a snowboarding accident left her with a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and significant cognitive impairments.

Friday, August 13

Adding Cost Data to Palliative Care: Shared Decision-Making: 10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.

Shared decision-making (SDM) involves patient-clinician communication to select treatment based on a balance between clinical evidence and patient preferences and values. Decision aids—patient materials to support SDM—have been developed, but in most cases they lack cost information to complement the clinical options. This session will describe the successful launch of the SDM feature on FAIR Health’s consumer website, its evaluation and plans for expanding the work.

Utilizing Technology to Improve Medication Access Barriers: 10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.

2020 has exposed many gaps in the healthcare industry, including how patients access their medications. The 2021 CoverMyMeds Medication Access Report takes a deep dive into medication access barriers patients experienced in the last year—some perennial and others precipitated by a tumultuous year. This session will review the most impactful findings from the 2021 report and provide discussion on the industry’s path forward to help patients access the medications they need.

Preconference Forum

The week kicks off Monday, Aug. 9, with topic-focused or audience-specific events before general programming and exhibition opens. Each full-day program is immersive in actionable sessions and networking. Events are optional. Additional registration required.

HIMSS and the Cleveland Clinic continue to collaborate on the Patient Experience & Consumerization Forum. This year’s forum will dig deeper than ever into the consumerization of health—the patient’s demand for access to convenient and affordable care, whether it be things like virtual care, retail clinics or homecare.

The program will explore how empathetic care overcame new challenges—in both in-person and virtual settings—due to COVID-19. Speakers will discuss how they maintained the human connection during the pandemic.