Texas Children’s Health Plan Highlights Patient Communication

Date: June 17, 2024

Attention: All Providers

Call to action: Texas Children’s Health Plan (TCHP) would like to highlight the topic of patient communication this month with our providers. One aspect of patient communication, Motivational Interviewing, has been known to aid in promoting healthy habits and optimizing self-care. “Health coaching, its origin from motivational interviewing, enhances patient self-management of chronic conditions by improving patient compliance and outcomes, and reducing costs.” Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19745624/

Background information: Based on the 2023 Experience of Care and Health Outcomes (ECHO) survey results, patients feel that their children’s doctors are not listening to them carefully and are not explaining their health status in a clear and understandable manner. In addition, patients feel disrespected and not enough time was spent with them. Please reference this table for detailed results from the 2023 ECHO Survey.

How this impacts providers: To enhance patient communication for our members,TCHP strongly encourages provider’s participation in a CE/CME course focused on Motivational Interviewing offered by Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) available here.  The learning objectives include the following:

• Assess how motivational interviewing (MI) differs from traditional provider-patient communication and why it can effectively motivate positive behavior changes.
• Integrate MI best practices into routine clinical encounters to promote healthy habits and optimum self-care.

Next step for Providers: As learned in the course, providers should integrate best practices in communication to promote trust, positivity, and comfort in discussions in the provider-patient relationship.

If you have any questions, please email Provider Relations at: providerrelations@texaschildrens.org.

For access to all provider alerts,log into:
www.thecheckup.org or www.texaschildrenshealthplan.org/for-providers.