MHQP Convenes Patient Engagement Roundtable to Accelerate Healthcare Affordability

(November 2018)

On December 5, MHQP will convene a Patient Engagement Roundtable Discussion on Affordability designed to identify strategies for impacting healthcare affordability through patient activation and engagement.

This effort is made possible by a small grant from the Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement (NRHI), which is seeding opportunities to increase health, reduce price and eliminate waste in communities throughout the US through its Getting to Affordability Initiative.

The RFP from NRHI nicely sums up the challenge:

“Every day the need for healthcare cost transparency mounts as purchasers’ and consumers’ tolerance for rising healthcare costs is tested. Increased media attention is creating awareness and a sense of urgency to solve the healthcare affordability crisis sending everyone searching for a solution. New disruptions are a regular occurrence with purchasers taking matters into their own hands. Once taboo, people are now willing to talk about ‘price’ as one of the root causes of unaffordable healthcare and are demanding more transparency and explanations for wide variation in costs.”

MHQP is thrilled to have the opportunity to offer our unique perspective and approach to this critical issue.

As with all things MHQP, our exploration of this topic will uniquely focus on patients – specifically the role patient engagement can play in making healthcare more affordable. We plan to put patients at the center of the conversation, with five members of MHQP’s Consumer Health Council included in the Roundtable. They will be joined in the discussion by distinguished providers, health plan representatives, researchers, policy makers and innovators.

By structuring the meeting around the patient voice, we hope to promote a better understanding of consumers’ perspectives on the very important issue of affordability and discuss how we can reduce healthcare costs by removing barriers to patients getting the right care at the right time in the right place. These barriers to be explored include access, capacity, health literacy, transparency and trust.

The goal of the meeting will be to produce 3-5 specific action steps to advance affordability in our community.

“We are so excited about the opportunity to convene this fantastic, diverse group of experts around this important issue,” said Barbra Rabson, MHQP’s President and CEO. “Patient engagement is an emerging field with great potential to reduce healthcare costs. We hope to find some breakthrough strategies for tackling affordability and look forward to sharing the ideas that come out of this meeting.”