Engaging Consumers: Introduction
Health IT and health information exchange (HIE) can provide the knowledge and tools to enable consumers to fully engage in their own care in partnership with providers and the larger health system. Such tools allow consumers to do more for themselves, including making informed behavioral choices, knowing when to seek outside care, and coordinating the care they receive from multiple sources. Health IT can create a new standard of care in which delivering information, self-care tools and decision aids to the patient are as integral to high quality care as providing tests, medications and treatments.
This module is designed to support national, state and community leaders better understand and reach out to consumers and other key stakeholders. There are a number of resources and tools to help organizations effectively communicate with the public—using eHI’s InformationSTAT™ communications toolkit, which were developed based on attitude and opinion research conducted by Public Opinion Strategies LLC in 2006.
The Engaging Consumers module of the Toolkit provides:
- A shared vision for engaging consumers in their care through health information technology and health information exchange
- Guiding principles for engaging consumers
- Broad strategies and actions to engage consumers and improve the quality, safety and efficiency of healthcare through health IT and health information exchange
- Best practices and community experiences in engaging consumers
- Comprehensive resources and tools to help you engage consumers, This section includes the well known InformationSTAT™ Program Tools: a set of customizable public education and communications tools that can be used by national, state and regional leaders to raise awareness of the importance of HIT and HIE
- Consensus legislation related to engaging consumers
- Our leadership, working groups and staff who are contributing to
