Patients play their cards close to their chest when it comes to sharing their personal information. But despite hesitancy to spread their health data far and wide, Cassie’s Prescribing Privacy Report revealed that 87% of Americans are willing to share their information with healthcare providers with the belief that it will lead to enhanced care.
The challenge lies in earning and maintaining patients’ trust that data won’t be mishandled or misused. Providers can accomplish this by deferring to patient preferences and creating a seamless experience.
Confusion and redundancies
Fifty-four percent of patients told us they’ve been asked to provide the same consent for data sharing multiple times within a single healthcare system, and more than a third (35%) have experienced a disjointed process when providing consent across multiple healthcare organisations. Of those, 8 in 10 say this caused confusion and 89% report frustration. Note: respondents with children were 37% more likely than those without to have experienced a disjointed process.
This highlights an urgent need for providers to simplify the consent and data sharing process. But there’s no need to start from scratch – the Prescribing Privacy Report uncovered how patients prefer and expect to share data with their providers. Let’s explore!
Explicit informed consent
With respondents listing informed consent as their #1 concern with healthcare data practices, it’s no surprise that an overwhelming majority want clear communication surrounding data sharing. Ninety-two percent of Americans believe explicit opt-in consent should be a mandatory requirement for sharing health data, and 88% would like to be informed of their rights and protections every time they’re asked to volunteer this information.
This leads to an improved perception of their providers, as 94% prefer healthcare providers who implement robust data protection measures.
Transparency is everything
Patients are also hungry for increased convenience and transparency: 97% believe they should have access to their rights and protections at their own convenience. Additional desires to consider include access to records (69%), transparent privacy policies (65%), and access controls (57%).
The power of consent and preference management
With 81% of patients telling us they’re more likely to trust a provider that works with a third party to ensure consent management and compliance, providers struggling to build trust should consider investing in a consent and preference management platform like Cassie.
Cassie will give you a leg up in boosting transparency, prioritising preferences, and staying compliant with the latest regulations so you can show patients why they can trust you with their most vital information.
Whilst consent management allows individuals to choose whether they receive communications or not, preference management enables the end user to have more granular control over the type of communications they receive.
Organisations can customise their preference management with Cassie, allowing consumers to select the frequency, channel, content and more. Cassie’s data model is flexible, meaning it can attach personas to each data subject record defined. This allows you to separate a person’s preferences based on each persona created for more specific targeting and personalisation.
