Are Educational Pamphlets Enough? — How Digital Patient Education Can Enhance Your Practice
Educational pamphlets and patient handouts will always be a part of the industry of medicine, but the question remains: are they enough to fully educate your patients?
It’s safe to say that in 2022 we’re living in the digital age, or in other words, “the time-period in which personal computers and other technologies…provide users the ability to easily and rapidly transfer information”. This age is forcing previous ways of communicating ideas and communicating with each other to become out of date. And patient education needs an upgrade.
So, back to the printed educational pamphlet. Take a minute to ask yourself: How many pamphlets or handouts do I have in the office? In my home? How about in the trash? Let’s face it. Realistically, most of the pamphlets and handouts both you and your patients receive have a high risk of ending up in the trash, along with the information they contain. Fortunately, the digital age has introduced digital resources that can reinforce the printed information that so often gets lost.
Long gone are the days of paper-only communication, and even in-person-only communication. So what can be done to facilitate the transfer of information to your patients?
The addition of online/remote care is a great place to start. Here are some reasons why pairing online/remote care with educational pamphlets and patient handouts would be beneficial for you and your patients.
1. Save Time, Money, and the Environment
While the cost of developing and printing educational pamphlets and handouts for patients will vary from practice to practice, it’s no secret that it does take time and money out of your budget. There’s many different steps and accumulated costs, in the process of obtaining educational pamphlets and handouts. And, when it comes to creating your own, you need to account for designing, writing, printing, shipping costs, and distributing the materials.
Incorporating remote care into your practice when it comes to educating your patients will save you a good amount of time and money that could be put towards other important strategies. Not to mention the fact that it will be a greener alternative to strictly printing educational pamphlets and handouts. Lessening your ecological footprint will not only be great for the environment, but patients will appreciate that you are transitioning towards more ‘green’ alternatives.
2. Communication Will be More Personal
Repeatedly printing educational brochures in bulk doesn’t exactly show that the content inside is personalized for your patients. They can take a look around the office and see multiple patients holding the same pamphlet with the same information.
The number of patients that want their personal needs to be taken into account rather than a “one size fits all” pamphlet is increasing, and educational pamphlets are failing to meet those needs. Offering digital resources to your patients along with the pamphlets and patient handouts will give them a greater sense of personalization.
Especially in today’s world, patients will greatly benefit from easily accessible personalized care rather than educational pamphlets and handouts. Digital platforms such as BodySite.com allow you to care for your patients remotely while providing information and content that is completely relevant to their needs.
3. Information Can Be Constantly Updated
Educational pamphlets and handouts contain information that can easily become out of date, but with the cost of developing and printing them, it’s a waste to have to reprint them with new information every now and then. Perhaps you would like to update the visuals on the pamphlet, but it would once again be too costly to reprint them. By the time you give out your last educational pamphlet to a patient, there could even be a chance that the information provided is now false due to new findings.
With online/remote care, these are things you will never have to worry about. Any information that you digitally release to patients can be easily edited which will help ensure that your patients are getting the most accurate and updated information when it comes to their personalized care. This way, once they’ve finished looking through the pamphlet, they can turn to a digital platform to keep up with any new information.
4. You’ll Provide an Exciting Experience for Your Patients
Using remote patient care can provide your patients with interactive and personalized content. While educational pamphlets and handouts may have been able to share pictures with patients, providing digital information can allow you to insert videos, enlargeable pictures, clickable links, etc.
Being able to share many resources and visuals with patients throughout their customized care can allow your patients an even more enjoyable and personable experience.
To quote Kelly Engelmann and Lori Esarey, two healthcare providers who use the BodySite remote patient care platform: ”It’s really been a blessing to see all of our content come to life. To those of you who have files and files and files of what we call “wellness wisdom” such as PDF documents, videos, and classes that we had recorded. BodySite can be used as a warehouse for you to create or place your content so that your content is repurposed again; it comes to life.”
5. You Can Easily Track the Progress of Your Patients
While educational pamphlets and handouts initially give your patients the information that they need, you can’t track your patients’ consumption of information or task completion on a piece of paper. Introducing online/remote care alongside your pamphlets/handouts can open the door to many tracking functionalities such as the ability to track food, activity, body metrics, completed tasks, etc.
You can also use online/remote patient care to integrate connected devices such as FitBit, Withings Blood Pressure Cuff, and Innotech Scale.
Adding Online/Remote Patient Care to Your Practice
The addition of remote patient care is a beneficial change and a great investment for you and your patients. Using digital resources in tandem with educational pamphlets and handouts will allow you to better take care of your patients, easily track their progress, and give them a much easier way to communicate with you regarding their care plans.
If you’re looking for remote care tools to assist you in adding online/remote patient care to your practice, check out BodySite.com. BodySite offers HIPAA compliant messaging/telemedicine, an automated patient education system, and many other ways to care for your patients remotely.
Click here to claim your 30-Day Free Trial of the BodySite platform; click here to learn more about the BodySite solution.
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