Providers can improve pediatric care by boosting engagement with parents and caregivers throughout the care process to promote education and increase awareness.
When parents and caregivers are more educated on their children’s health conditions, treatment options, and preventative care, they are more empowered to make informed healthcare decisions and participate actively in their child’s health.
By adopting patient engagement technology such as portals, mobile apps, and outreach automation, providers make care more accessible while reducing staff burnout associated with manual tasks, such as scheduling appointments and completing required forms.
These tools also help staff identify and manage patients’ key health milestones such vaccinations and annual wellness visits, driving more collaborative pediatric care and creating better health outcomes for children.
The challenges of pediatric engagement
Pediatric patient engagement can be thought of as the involvement of children and adolescents in the decision-making of daily clinical care, research, and intervention development, according to a recent article in the Journal of Patient-Reported Outcomes.
Pediatric patient engagement has been shown to increase children’s self-confidence and sense of control, resulting in better treatment outcomes, and to improve the translation from research to clinical practice. However, pediatric engagement is often reduced by the tendency of adults to protect children from making difficult decisions, according to the article.
Indeed, from the provider’s perspective, it is always difficult when the person you are seeking to engage is not only the patient, but the patient’s representative or caregiver – typically a parent. Ultimately, this is one of the fundamental challenges of pediatrics.
Another barrier specific to pediatrics is the frequency of care that’s needed. With children, care is more of an iterative, involved process requiring more frequent wellness visits and vaccinations, compared with adults. Further, when children are well and symptom-free, they still need to be kept on a care schedule, which requires frequent reminders and education to parents.
Children fall off proper vaccine schedules frequently, which is why there is a need for vaccine registries. Additionally, not all children have the same access to their providers, often due to socioeconomic issues, creating more challenges for lower-income families. For busy working parents, it can become very easy to get off-schedule because taking children to wellness visits is inconvenient and time-consuming.
3 ways to improve pediatric engagement
Pediatric practices are often burdened with high operating costs and low reimbursement, leading to overworked and stressed-out clinicians and staff members. However, providers can reduce administrative burdens and mitigate burnout by implementing technology that simplifies and automates many routine and repeatable tasks, in addition to personalizing communication and strengthening connections between patients and providers. Here’s how:
- Patient portals: Unlike episodic or iterative technology such as telehealth services, patient portals drive repeated use by acting as a single source of truth for all health-related information. Portals foster frequent communication and serve as a healthcare hub for patients to keep them engaged. Importantly, portals enable constant connection between providers and patients during time in-between visits, offering an easy way to schedule appointments, obtain educational materials, and complete forms.
- Personalize the experience: All children have different healthcare needs, while, at the same time, all parents and caregivers harbor differing expectations of service from their pediatric providers. Accordingly, providers should focus on personalizing the care experience as much as possible, taking the time to learn about each child and associated family dynamic. This may include asking questions such as:
- Are there any specific considerations to be aware of?
- Do the parents in question prefer certain communication channels, like texts and in-portal messages instead of phone calls and emails?
- What is the parent or caregiver’s level of health literacy?
Learning the specifics and personalizing the care experience for each patient helps to make them feel valued and enables providers to stand out against competitors that may not tailor their approach to each patient. As an additional benefit, consistently offering a personalized patient experience is likely to increase adherence to treatment plans and lead to better health outcomes.
- Communicate regularly: Both parents and children want some level of control over pediatric care, creating the need for regular communication with providers. To facilitate stronger family engagement and improve patient retention, providers should ensure that they are keeping parents in the loop before, during, and between office visits. Doing so helps to keep patient and caregiver education up to date between appointments and presents opportunities for them to ask questions to express any concerns.
Improving pediatric care requires a strong focus on engaging both parents and caregivers throughout the care process. By adopting patient engagement technologies, providers can enhance accessibility, streamline routine tasks, and reduce staff burnout, all while keeping families informed and involved. Personalized care and regular communication further strengthen the relationship between providers and families, ensuring that children receive timely, well-coordinated care. Ultimately, by empowering parents and caregivers with education and proactive tools, providers can drive better health outcomes for children and foster a more collaborative approach to pediatric care.
About Gary Hamilton
Gary has led InteliChart since its inception in 2010. He brings a wealth of clinical and technical expertise associated with consumer-patient engagement and provider practice operations. Gary drives corporate strategy, product innovation, and direction toward one common objective: to enable providers to successfully engage and empower their patients to attain successful outcomes.
