Improving care by engaging patients in self-management

The challenge

Informed, activated patients have the best chance at achieving good health outcomes. When patients are empowered to be "self-managers," they are more confident and better prepared to do daily tasks to manage their health conditions, including working with clinicians to advance shared health goals.

But self-management isn’t easy. It can involve understanding and following complex routines and making difficult changes in lifestyle. Patients need support from their care teams, and care teams need practical tools to help them provide this support. To accelerate the pace of change in this area, we worked with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the California HealthCare Foundation, and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) on the New Health Partnerships initiative. 

The work

The mission of New Health Partnerships was to both explore how clinical teams can best support patients in managing their own illnesses and empower patients to be more active participants in their care. Activities of the initiative included:

• Supporting and managing an online community of patients providing information, resources, and opportunities for discussion
• Offering resources and tools to clinicians, patients, family members, and communities so that they could effectively collaborate in self-management support
• Providing clinicians and administrative leaders with tools and examples to evaluate the business case for collaborative self-management support in their own organizations
• Developing two mirrored toolkits — one for clinicians and one for patients — that outlines productive ways for both to collaborate more fully  

Impact

The learnings from New Health Partnerships are available in the following tools hosted on the IHI website:

Self-Management Toolkit for People with Chronic Conditions and Their Families
A resource for patients and family members dealing with chronic or long-term conditions, to help them more effectively self-manage their health and their lives with such conditions.

Partnering in Self-Management Support: A Toolkit for Clinicians
Intended for a diverse range of primary care practices, this toolkit offers tips, tools, and resources to get you started helping your patients better manage their chronic conditions today.

---

Featured publications

Battersby M, Von Korff M, Schaefer J, Davis C, Ludman E, Greene SM, Parkerton M, Wagner EH. Twelve evidence-based principles for implementing self-management support in primary care. Jt Comm J Qual Patient Saf. 2010; 36:561-70. PubMed

Simmons L, Baker NJ, Schaefer J, Miller D, Anders S. Activation of patients for successful self-management. J Ambul Care Manage. 2009 Jan-Mar;32(1):16-23. doi: 10.1097/01.JAC.0000343120.07844.a9. PubMed

---