The importance of specialized, close and empathetic care for chronic patients who need more assistance

Photo: Microsoft 365

Chronic conditions have been a concern for a long time and health clinics have tried to improve their ways of managing patients with chronic diseases. According to the CDC, six in ten adults in the US have a chronic condition. These patients need to be properly monitored in order to keep these conditions in check. One effective way of managing chronic patients and monitoring their conditions is with the use of new digital tools and services that have emerged over the last couple of years. Let's take a look at the importance of specialized, close and empathetic care for chronic patients who need more assistance during their healthcare journey.

Chronic conditions require more seamless and continuous chronic disease management

In order to keep an eye out on chronic patients, health clinics need to be able to provide a faster and more seamless way of managing their chronic conditions as well as monitoring them. Continuous chronic disease management is necessary between doctors' appointments. Being able to track behavior and disease progression reliably is a sure way of helping patients with a better treatment plan.

To assist with the condition-specific factors, health clinics can help patients with new, digital tools that come in the form of digital health tools, including digital therapeutics, wearables, remote patient monitoring, coaching, and education as well as digital services such as telemedicine. The various digital tools used can help with elements such as activity tracking, medication reminders, and recording A1c levels, blood pressure, or other vitals. This way, information about a patient's healthcare journey is accurate and monitored constantly rather than only during the appointments.

Utilizing digital tools and services to educate patients on how to monitor chronic diseases

As mentioned above, it is essential to monitor each patient with a chronic condition. However, relying on a manual chronic care management approach presents a number of challenges for the healthcare staff. Limited time and resources are going to pose a problem. What can efficiently help patients to keep track of their chronic conditions is a digital solution that reduces the burden on the care team, improves chronic care management efforts, and helps the patients keep track of their own condition effectively.

This kind of technology-driven support can greatly reduce stress on healthcare systems around the world and support a more sustainable and effective solution for several reasons. One example of how technology-driven solutions to monitor chronic patients can benefit both patients and clinics is by having care teams who can monitor, educate and coach patients to keep them on track with their care plan without adding to the care team workload.

Specialized and empathetic care in the form of AI can help chronic patients

The world of technology has expanded tremendously. Aside from various tools and gadgets that we have mentioned above, health clinics can utilize the full potential of AI which is powered by new technologies such as natural language processing and machine learning. The combination of these two can create an AI that has many practical applications in the world of healthcare. For example, Patricia, a natural language processing engine built by our team at Eniax helps health clinics with many different tasks and it also communicates with patients efficiently.

Using chronic patient follow-up service, patients can engage in communication with AI. Therefore, AI can send reminders to patients about their chronic conditions and what they need to monitor and check. For example, if a patient has diabetes, AI can send him a list of several questions at certain intervals. Based on the patient responses, AI such as Patricia can rank patients based on this data. Essentially, they can be ranked based on the risk level which can be low, medium, or high. Based on the risk level, communicate with these patients more frequently by sending reminders less frequently. If the chronic disease results get worse when a patient monitors them, AI will immediately schedule an appointment.

This is an extremely efficient way in which patients with chronic conditions can monitor their own health condition at their home while also directly sending data to their health clinic and communicating with AI that has the ability to communicate completely natural thanks to the natural language processing engine and machine learning. By using this kind of service, health clinics can monitor even patients who live in remote areas and cannot check with their doctors in person every single time due to the distance, transportation costs, etc. Thanks to the NLP engine, this kind of AI is empathetic and has the ability to approach each patient differently. Simple text-based communication with patients can engage patients in their chronic condition management and help them better understand and monitor their condition.

Digital care for chronic patients that is personalized and empathetic - In conclusion

So, in summary, we can see that through the use of various digital tools and wearables, patients can monitor their chronic health conditions themselves. However, in addition to this, to further reduce the healthcare workload and improve the efficiency of monitoring patients, health clinics can utilize powerful AI systems that use NLP engines and machine learning to communicate with patients.

This kind of AI can form a better bond with patients and they can be personalized depending on what patient likes or dislikes and what kind of communication they prefer. Therefore, a digital form of care for chronic patients who need to monitor their conditions daily is available and can be enhanced with the usage of new and innovative technologies in the form of NLP AI and many other digital tools and services.