While everyone has heard of the classic healthcare jobs like physician, nurse, or surgeon, one of the lesser-known jobs in the industry is patient advocate.
According to Nichole Davis, a board-certified patient advocate and founder of Wayfinder Patient Advocates, patient advocacy “is the act of keeping the patient front and center in their care.”
“It’s trying to make sure that the [health system] is the best-fitting, the most equitable, the most beneficial, and the most cost-effective,” Davis said. “It’s essentially just going to bat for the patient.”
Davis sat down with Healthcare Brew to offer a better understanding of patient advocacy, what it’s like to work in the field, and how it affects the broader healthcare system.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What roles could someone take up in the patient advocacy field?
Everybody that has a consciousness of patient impact or patient centricity can be a patient advocate in any healthcare role that they’re in. For example, you have financial patient advocates that may be employed by a hospital, and they help patients navigate the financial implications of their care. You can have a doctor that speaks up for a patient.
You could also be like me: I’m a private patient advocate, which means that I don’t have an affiliation to a particular hospital or insurance company or pharmaceutical company.
What would you say is the biggest misconception people have about the type of work you do?
It has a lot to do with the kind of support that you offer as a patient advocate. I don’t diagnose, I don’t treat. Patients don’t come to me and say, “Hey, my doctor gave me an option of these three meds. I don’t know which one to take,” and I say, “You should take the second one.”
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It’s more like they would say, “Hey, I don’t know which one to take,” and we would try to make sure that we understand the side effects, we understand the timeline for when the patient would expect to see symptoms improved for each medication. You gather as much information as you can so that the patient can sit back and look at this and say, “OK, I think I would like to take medication number three.”
How would you say patient advocacy affects the broader healthcare system?
Patient advocacy, in my opinion, is the foundation, the bedrock of all of these changes we want to see happen in healthcare. Patient advocacy helps so we don’t waste money and time and emotional distress on wrong medications, too many tests, potentially sitting with a diagnosis that’s not right for a number of years, or going through a treatment plan that isn’t right.
When you invest in a patient and can say, “OK, they can now be an informed party in this decision and all decision-making in their care,” ultimately your efforts are more efficient and better tailored toward that person. If we can come together as an industry and really make an effort in patient advocacy and by proxy, empowerment, that can be the launch board for value-based care.