Patient centricity in healthcare training
Improving patient outcomes is a, if not the, top priority for all healthcare practitioners. In recent years, the patient has moved from the margins to the center in terms of their role in some aspects of healthcare decision-making. It is imperative that current gaps continue to be bridged between training needs, professional practices, and patient outcomes, with greater attention paid to keeping the patient in mind during knowledge and skills development training, whether internal or external. This article highlights how we can position patients at the center of healthcare training and the evolving role of hybrid learning.
How do we position the patient as the ultimate priority in healthcare training?
Patients as decision-makers
Improved clinician-patient communication
Patient-reported outcomes
Better outcomes for patients and HCPs
Patients have become key participants in their own healthcare decisions. Healthcare practice increasingly incorporates patients’ perceptions and experiences through clinical data gathering, diagnosis, and treatment. To equip Medical Affairs professionals to support healthcare professionals (HCPs) in making the right choices for their patients, they too must consider the influence of the patient voice.
Whether you’re training HCPs or Medical Affairs teams, developing their understanding of patient experiences of disease and treatment options helps facilitate more constructive clinician-patient conversations. Training must facilitate HCPs and Medical Affairs teams to navigate the values, feelings, and needs of patients to support them to make informed choices in their treatment plans.
RWE values PRO data describing the impact of drugs on quality of life, daily activities, and symptoms. These data inform wide-range of healthcare decisions, including guidelines and support tools used in clinical practice, clinical trial designs, and new treatment approaches. Fit-for-purpose training of HCPs and Medical Affairs teams must take account of the power of the patient voice.
Studies shows shared decision-marking involving patients improves their:
- Recall of essential information
- Treatment adherence
- Reported satisfaction
- Participation in monitoring and preventative medicine activities
Training HCPs and Medical Affairs to communicate better with patients helps to improve patient outcomes and inform future research.
Make the patient journey the learner journey to build empathy and understanding
Let your learner journey follow the patient journey!
- Putting the learner in the patient’s position works well with inquiry-based and self-directed learning
- It helps defamiliarize both disease and treatment knowledge from the contexts of pathologies, clinical trials, and competitor landscapes, and repositions it inside the diverse frameworks of patient experiences
- Bite-sized training sessions can mirror the atomized encounters of the patient with their HCPs, helping to disrupt automatic thought processes and assumptions that can lead to miscommunications and biases
Patient chart
Name: Tom Black Age: 32 years Occupation: Engineer
Medical history:
- Hay fever
- Childhood asthma
- Physically active, enjoys running, and often competes in marathons locally
Complaint:
- Recently, Tom has been feeling quite tired and breathless, which is unusual for him
- He has a non-productive cough at night and intermittent chest tightness with it
The journey in action
Hybrid learning holds the key to patient centricity
Patient avatars engage learners
Highlight issues around disease and treatment impact that affect patient quality of life using a patient avatar. Creating diverse, real-world based avatars with unique patient journeys helps remind learners to be empathetic and think about individuals, not just data.
Case studies and speakers Case studies showcasing patients’ lived experience from initial symptoms through diagnosis, treatment, and beyond help learners connect clinical data and patient impact. Whether patients speak live, or whether recorded video clips are embedded in elearning, these informal encounters offer distinct perspectives from clinic settings and PROs, which help learners think holistically about clinical practice.
Listen to real patients with a podcast HCPs and Medical Affairs teams are busy people, and time to train is often short. Podcasts that include interviews with patients or patient advocacy groups give learners another way to access lived experiences so they can train while they travel. Q&As can provide insights into specific challenges in juggling treatments of choice with quality-of-life consequences.
Virtual clinics and role play Real-life training scenarios offer learners opportunities to practise interacting with and responding to fictional patients staging real examples. These hands-on learning experiences enable quick, efficient feedback to be given against predetermined competency frameworks and boost learner confidence.