CAMBRIDGE, MA., May 26, 2015 – PatientsLikeMe and Partners HealthCare announced today that they are working together to give Partners HealthCare patients access to tools and information that can help improve decision making with their clinical teams and enhance health outcomes.
PatientsLikeMe Executive Vice President of Marketing and Patient Advocacy Michael Evers said the agreement is the first to provide access to the website from within a provider’s patient portal. “We’re excited to work with such an esteemed health system to help patients and their care teams have a more complete understanding of patients’ whole health experience, and to support shared decision making about next steps.”
Partners Population Health Management Associate Medical Director Adam Licurse, MD, MHS, who is a leader in population health patient engagement efforts at Partners, added the agreement is a key building block towards the healthcare system’s vision for better involving patients in their care. “We know that as patients become more engaged in their care, they have better care experiences, make more informed decisions based on their goals, and in some cases can actually receive higher value care at the end of the day. Peer mentorship, patient self-management, and patient education are all critical pieces to that puzzle. We believe PatientsLikeMe’s online patient community provides a meaningful solution to help meet these needs.”
As part of the agreement, the organizations:
- Have provided access to PatientsLikeMe from Partners Patient Gateway, an online tool for patients to learn more about their condition and communicate with their doctors’ offices.
- Will introduce a new “PatientsLikeMe 101” training series to guide Partners HealthCare clinical teams in helping patients and caregivers get the most out of PatientsLikeMe’s tools and support network.
- Plan to include patients’ use of the website and its tools at the point of care in select Partners HealthCare clinical care sites and practices. Partners HealthCare clinicians are currently outlining several projects designed to understand how the use of patient-generated health data at the point of care can impact health outcomes, patient engagement, patient empowerment, care coordination and patient satisfaction. The projects are expected to kick off this year.
Partners HealthCare patients are welcome to voluntarily join PatientsLikeMe at http://www.patientslikeme.com or through their Partners Patient Gateway account.
About PatientsLikeMe
PatientsLikeMe® (www.patientslikeme.com) is a patient network that improves lives and a real-time research platform that advances medicine. Through the network, patients connect with others who have the same disease or condition and track and share their own experiences. In the process, they generate data about the real-world nature of disease that help researchers, pharmaceutical companies, regulators, providers, and nonprofits develop more effective products, services and care. With more than 325,000 members, PatientsLikeMe is a trusted source for real-world disease information and a clinically robust resource that has published more than 60 peer-reviewed research studies. Visit us at www.patientslikeme.com or follow us via our blog, Twitter or Facebook.
About Partners HealthCare
Partners HealthCare is an integrated health care system, founded by Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, that offers patients a continuum of coordinated and high-quality care. In addition to its two academic medical centers, the Partners system includes community and specialty hospitals, a managed care organization, a physician network, community health centers, home health and long-term care services, and other health care entities. Partners HealthCare is committed to patient care, research, teaching, and service to the community. Partners is one of the nation’s leading biomedical research organizations and is a principal teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. Partners HealthCare is a non-profit organization.
Contact
Margot Carlson Delogne
PatientsLikeMe
mcdelogne@patientslikeme.com
(781) 492-1039
The collaboration will help patients to go for better treatment from the beginning, as this will help clinic teams to enhance health outcomes, as the clinical teams will have complete understanding about the patient’s health experience.