{"id":378,"date":"2012-09-18T20:42:27","date_gmt":"2012-09-19T00:42:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ptca.org\/voice\/?p=378"},"modified":"2012-09-26T19:59:33","modified_gmt":"2012-09-26T23:59:33","slug":"an-informed-patient-is-a-healthier-patient","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ptca.org\/voice\/2012\/09\/18\/an-informed-patient-is-a-healthier-patient-378","title":{"rendered":"An Informed Patient is a Healthier Patient"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DoctorFindings in a report issued last week<\/a> by the Blue Shield of California Foundation demonstrate that an informed patient is an empowered patient: one who feels more comfortable asking questions of one’s healthcare provider, and making decisions about one’s own healthcare.<\/p>\n

While this equation may seem obvious, the report puts numbers to the equation, marking the significant differences between the informed and uninformed patient. Most importantly, the patient population studied consisted of low income families with annual household incomes less than 200% of the federal poverty level, or about $46,000 for a family of four.<\/p>\n

And here’s the surprise for those who may “write-off” this segment of patients as not being capable of “understanding” complex issues. According to the report, feeling informed about their health condition and confident in playing a role in their health care decisions was a stronger predictor of patients’ level of engagement than choice of health facility, level of education, income, gender, language spoken or race\/ethnicity. Got it? Information and understanding trumped all these other issues.<\/p>\n

The problem for low income patients, and I would expand that to ALL patients, is that the best way to be informed, according to 80%\u00a0 of the respondents in an earlier survey, was to have someone at a health care facility who “knows you pretty well,” but only 38% of respondents reported having such a point-person.<\/p>\n

According to a press release from Blue Shield of California<\/a>, some of the key findings of the study were:<\/p>\n