Sometimes when I talk about information therapy (Ix), I get a lot of head-nodding, but people still don’t fully understand what Ix really looks like in practice.

That’s why one of the most illuminating sessions at the 7th Annual Ix Conference next week (June 12-13) at the Newseum in Washington, DC will be, “Ix Killer Apps: Patient-Centered HIT in the Real World.

Specific Ix applications to be discussed include after-visit summaries, pre-visit preparation, multimedia decision aids, medication reconciliation, Ix for lab results, and use of health risk assessments for delivering more tailored information prescriptions. Both electronic and paper solutions will be addressed.

We’ll hear from innovative leaders from different kinds of practice settings and opposite sides of the country.

• James Hereford, Executive Vice President, Strategic Services & Quality, Group Health Cooperative
• Bill Kormos, MD, Education Director, John D. Stoeckle Center for Primary Care Innovation, Massachusetts General Hospital

After I provide a five-minute Ix overview, these leading innovators will demonstrate how Ix has been implemented in their disparate delivery settings. They will discuss the strategic reasons for pursuing Ix initiatives, issues involved in implementation, and their impact on care and efficiency.

If practices can implement these tools efficiently, they really will have nailed some “killer apps” by providing tools that really make a difference in the lives of their patients. Join us next week to figure out how to make this happen.

Certainly one of the best ways we have to assess patient-centered care is to ask consumers about their own experiences via scientific surveys. As I noted last week about Medicare publicly releasing HCAHPS data on patient experiences with hospital care, health care’s powers that be are emphasizing patient-reported data more than ever.

URAC has just released for public comment a new case management patient satisfaction tool, which is an important step forward in driving a patient-centered approach to delivering those services. Much of the tool is good.

Question #7 could be strengthened by drawing out more specific input from patients about the kind of information that helps people manage their care. It asks patients to rate agreement with the statement, “My Nurse/Case Manager provided verbal and/or written information that helped me reach my goals.”

We should have an expectation that case managers employ more than just live, oral communication to help people reach their goals. For that reason, the “or” is inadequate.

In some cases, however, “written” may not be sufficient either, given that it implies text. For some people, graphics, video, or audio may be more effective media. Perhaps most importantly, it should be information that the patient can save and refer to at his or her convenience.

Although the wording may still need work, better language to address patient-centered communication needs would be, “My Nurse/Case Manager provided information in a form that I could understand, access when I needed it, and helped me reach my goals.”

One thing that’s clear from a new study by Jack Fowler in this week’s JAMA is that hospital patients’ experience with care is unrelated to health care expenditures. Given how much we spend on health care in the US, we ought to figure out how to make it positively affect consumers’ experiences.

At our 7th Annual Ix Conference, “Next-Generation Patient-Centered Care,” we will address patient-centered communication and the incentives to encourage it from multiple angles. You can still register for this unique event in Washington, DC June 12-13.