Kristie Loescher, Ph.D., academic director of the Health Care Innovation Initiative, teaches a course called Healthcare System Management at the McCombs School of Business. In this course, and throughout a semester-long consulting project, students are introduced to the business ecosystem of the U.S. health care industry to investigate the business structures, processes and outcomes of health services in America.
The following post is authored by Ian Thomas Chiu, Phillip Kim, Kevin H. Shi, Haechan Yang and Taehyun Yun, University of Texas students who completed Loescher’s course.
Collaborating with the Department of Surgery and Perioperative Care at Dell Medical School and J. Mica Guzman, M.D., assistant professor at Dell Med, we reviewed treatment options for the bone health program within the Sports and Injury Integrated Practice Unit of the Musculoskeletal Institute at UT Health Austin. Our team’s goal was to understand group therapy benefits and provide related information to Guzman. First, we investigated which patients would be best suited to participate in group therapy and then suggested communication approaches that Guzman could employ to educate his patients about this particular treatment pathway.
In our first meeting with Guzman, our team learned about his clinic and the bone health conditions that affect his patients. One major takeaway was learning that physical exercises are considered a recommended form of treatment and provide a wide range of benefits to bone health in lieu of pharmacological treatment. We also learned about a group therapy program that takes a patient-centered approach to bone-health care.
We realized this group therapy program would enable Guzman’s clinic to invest more time in teaching patients critical exercises for their bone health related conditions. As a result, we ultimately proposed the creation of an educational patient pamphlet that outlines information on general bone health as well as the group therapy program. To achieve this, our team researched best practices in patient education.
We found that patients who are equipped with information about their health conditions are more involved in the treatment process. For patients with acute or chronic conditions at the Musculoskeletal Institute, patient involvement is an important factor that leads to lifestyle changes that benefit their condition.
In order to help educated patients get actively involved in their treatment plans, we zeroed in on the concept of patient activation. “Activated” patients know how to manage their health condition and have the skills and confidence necessary to develop healthy habits. Our team found that educating a patient on treatment methods could lead to high levels of activation.
Based on these findings, we also recommended that the bone health program implement a test called the Patient Activation Measure prior to appointments. The Patient Activation Measure survey is a questionnaire of 22 statements that assesses a patient’s level of activation. The Musculoskeletal Institute already employs patient-reported outcome measures in their approach to care, so our team suggested incorporation of this survey for bone health appointments. We believe that patient responses to the PAM survey can be used by providers to inform them on effective ways to present treatment options to their patients.
Through this project, we discovered that the process of treating a patient extends beyond a physician’s office. Our task of helping Guzman measure patient activation and educating patients about treatment plans fed into Dell Med’s broader focus of pursuing value-based health and patient-centered care.
This experience redefined and refined our views of the health care system. As aspiring physicians, learning about concepts such as patient activation helped us start to see “the bigger picture” in health care.