Best Practices for Using Healthie Care Plans

Healthie's Care Plans feature enables providers and organizations to apply common protocols and methods of care to patients, while still facilitating the customization/personalization that may happen on a per-patient basis. Within a Care Plan, you can add wellness recommendations, upload documents for patients to access, automatically set goals, and more. 

While sharing session notes is a great way to quickly communicate post-session recommendations with patients, session notes are usually written by a provider, for a provider. Session notes aren’t as comprehensive and easy to understand for a patient  However, Care Plans put these recommendations into a digestible, accessible format for patients to refer back to between sessions. Care Plans can help you track patient progress consistently over time, as they can be updated as patient needs change and grow. 

Here are our best practices for using Care Plans with your patients. 

Create a Care Plan Template

When working with multiple patients or in a multi-provider organization, you may already leverage general care plan templates to streamline workflows. Healthie's Care Plans feature enables providers and organizations to apply common protocols and methods of care to patients, while still facilitating the customization/personalization that may happen on a per-patient basis. Within a Care Plan, you can add wellness recommendations, upload documents for patients to access, automatically set goals, and more. 

By saving a Care Plan as a Template, you'll have the ability to quickly apply a created Care Plan to another patient. Your templates save in a digital library, and essentially enable you to share your standard treatment recommendations & protocols. For solo practitioners and group practices, apart from saving time, Care Plan templates create a standardization of care recommendations. 

However, be sure that when using a template your care plan doesn’t become too general.  Add specific information to each treatment plan so it is individualized to each patient. In order to make progress towards their health goals, it is important that each care plan is tailored to the patient.  You can weave your patients’ goals into the Care Plan, to create a plan that is manageable and feasible and will allow patients to make solid progress in between appointments.  Additionally, patient progress is rarely a linear process.  As you work with patients, their care plan might change after each check-in you have.  Having the ability to easily update their care plan to fit your patients’ needs for each week makes it easier to customize the plan to be most productive for your patient.   

Provide Realistic Nutrition & Wellness Recommendations

Oftentimes patients can be overwhelmed trying to absorb or write down information and recommendations. This can detract from the overall session, and ultimately negatively impact a patient’s ability to work on recommended health changes.  Therefore, a care plan should be more than just a summary of the information you went over during the appointment.  Care plans provide an opportunity for providers to break down complex treatment protocols into digestible recommendations for patients.  

Healthie Care Plans allow providers to clearly outline nutrition and wellness interventions, so patients can always have access to this healthcare advice and give patients a clear understanding of each step to take towards a positive health outcome.  

When you use Care Plans with a patient, be sure to communicate the purpose of the plan, and how you will use it together.  Your patients should understand that it is a tool you will both leverage when working together and not just a document for them to review each week.  Care Plans act as an outline of their health interventions and should be followed closely and carefully until the next follow-up appointment.  The plan will act as a guide to lifestyle changes leading to positive health outcomes, as well as a way to measure progress over long periods of time.  

Set Clear Wellness Goals Aligned with your Care Plan

Beyond making some steps towards change, health goals are achieved when patients can make consistent habit-forming changes. Making a collaborative effort towards goal setting shows your patients that you care about their progress and future success.  Goal setting has been shown to be effective in helping adults achieve changes in their dietary or physical activity behaviors.  Additionally, goal setting interventions that included support from a provider were much more effective than those in which patients set goals and worked on them individually.  

When you add a goal to a Care Plan, it will automatically sync with Healthie’s Goals feature, so that patients can access goals from their Care Plan from either feature.  The goals added to your Care Plan will display within the Care Plan in your patient’s account — it will not replace any existing goals that they already have. They will be able to view ALL GOALS within their “Goals” tab within Healthie.

Creating wellness goals is one thing, but monitoring a patient’s progress requires the right tools. Setting goals within Healthie allows wellness professionals to create time-specific goals for each patient. Through their patient portal, patients are able to receive reminders of their goals, check-off completed items, and easily see their completion progress for each goal.

Leverage Additional Resources to Elevate Recommendations

An additional advantage of creating physical care plans is that you have the ability to attach outside resources to the patient’s plan. If you leverage the Healthie Documents feature, you can easily include resources and documents you’ve already created into patient’s Care Plans.  Healthie’s Care Plans feature allows you to upload any document already in your library to a patient’s plan, so they have easy access to it and can review any time.  

This would be a great place to include meal plans, recipes, ebooks, or basic educational materials with patients.  Uploading the document to a patient’s plan avoids it getting lost in their email or computer and therefore patients contacting you looking for another copy.  

These documents or videos help elevate the care you provide to patients, by expanding interventions beyond the care plan.  Extra documents, such as recipe ideas, give patients concrete examples of how to incorporate recommendations into their daily lives.  They are an additional form of support for patients, as they can act as a jumping-off point for introducing new habits into their routine.  

Share your Care Plan with your Patient

The last, and most important, step in care plan creation is to share the plan with your patients.  Once done creating your care plan, scroll to the bottom of the Plan > click "Create Care Plan." This will NOT activate the Care Plan. You will need to take an additional step to make the plan "Active," and visible to your patient. After you create a plan, a green banner will appear within Healthie confirming that you have successfully added the plan, with the option to "Activate" or dismiss. 

Every patient can have a unique Care Plan, but they can only view one Care Plan at a time. You can also notify a patient via email that you’ve added a new Care Plan, by clicking the button that appears after activation to send the patient an email.