Interview with Dr. Jessie Gruman on What Does "Patient Engagement" Mean and Why It's Essential in Improving Health Care Delivery and Patient Outcomes (January 29, 2013)

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During this 28 minute podcast Dr. Gruman explains briefly the mission of the Center for Advancing Health.  She then defines what is patient engagement or patient participation by identifying ten categories that add up to 43 specific patient engagement behaviors.  Dr. Gruman then explains why patients are all too frequently unengaged in their own health care due to, for example, low literacy or health literacy, disability, etc.  She discusses how patients can actively engage in their own care using her own experiences as a cancer survivor as an example and what health care providers and regulators are doing to improve patient decision making and patient engagement measurement.  The interview concludes with comments on the work of the ACA-mandated Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) and the role of family or informal caregivers.  

Dr. Jessie Gruman is President of the Center for Advancing Health, a nonpartisan, Washington-based policy institute dedicated to advancing patient engagement in health care delivery, i.e., the Center advocates for policies and practices to overcome the challenges people face in finding good care and getting the most from it.   Dr. Gruman is also a Professorial Lecturer in the School of Public Health and Health Services at The George Washington University.  She serves on the board of trustees of the Center for Medical Technology Policy and the Technical Board of the Milbank Memorial Fund.   She too is a fellow of the Society for Behavioral Medicine and a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Council on Foreign Relations and the NY Academy of Medicine.  Among other works, Dr. Gruman is the author of The Experience of the American Patient: Risk, Trust and Choice (Health Behavior Media, 2009).  She was graduated from Columbia University with a Ph.D. in Social Psychology.   

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