Pre-Educating Patients: Tips for 2022
Implementing patient pre-education strategies is important when it comes to improving patient engagement and health outcomes, informing patients about their health and wellness, and administering wellness plans for preventative care, chronic disease management, diet management, and more.
As the world around us continues to advance technologically, it’s becoming less of a luxury and more of a necessity to offer digital versions of traditional educational tools to your patients. Some examples include…
- Automated patient education software that can bring patient educational handouts to life
- Use of educational videos that can be easily viewed and keep patients engaged
- Telehealth visits for personal education or answering patient questions
As you transition to digital patient education, it’s important to understand why pre-educating patients is essential along with how to go about it. Here are some tips for effectively pre-educating patients in 2022:
Determine the Health Literacy and Learning Style of Your Patients
Before you decide which educational tools will be best for a patient, it’s important to determine their current level of health literacy along with their preferred learning style.
Health literacy is defined by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) as “the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions.” Without functional health literacy, any educational materials used may not be very useful to the patient. For those with low health literacy, you can take the necessary actions to make sure that the educational materials used allow them to understand, engage, and act upon the information that is being provided.
Assessing the health literacy of your patients will allow you to better gauge the language and educational tools that should be used for each specific patient. Once you’ve determined their health literacy, it’s especially useful to go over what type of learning style they prefer. There’s a large range of techniques that can be used to educate your patients, but not every technique is for everyone. In order to find out what’s best, it’s important for you to simply work with your patients and figure out what type of learning style they prefer. Some may prefer to learn through reading, watching videos, talking through the information, etc., and you can figure out which one works for them the most through a simple discussion.
Utilize Educational Technology
Today’s technology has introduced a wide array of patient education materials. Not only are there several different options for you to choose from, but they can also be customized to fit the needs of certain patients before distribution. Rather than just handing your patients a handout or a stack of papers, you can opt to use an automated patient education software which gives you the ability to personalize as needed.
Using educational technology can also be convenient for both you and your patients as it’s much easier to store the educational materials that you often need. Studies have shown that patients forget up to 80% of what their doctors tell them during their appointments, but educational technology will allow them to store the information to look back on whenever something slips their memory. Giving your patients easier ways to retain the health information that they need will allow for improved health outcomes and better guided care.
Fortunately, BodySite’s technology can be used to further enhance compliance, patient engagement, and guidance. BodySite gives you the ability to create and customize pre-education materials for you to provide your patients with. You can also utilize digital intake forms to assess a patient’s health and determine what information they need to be given before assigning them to a care plan. From there, you can easily provide them with the relevant educational materials needed. You even have the ability to track their progress by giving them tasks that instruct them to go through their materials.
Of course if your patients prefer printed educational materials, it’s best to go with that in order to ensure that the educational tools you use for each patient are as effective as possible.
Take Advantage of Patient Teach-Back
Patient teach-back can promote patient engagement, better communication and understanding, and shared decision making. The AHRQ says that the goal of teach-back is to ensure that you have explained medical information clearly so that patients understand what you have communicated to them. Patient teach-back involves explaining a health concept to a patient and having them repeat the information they just learned in their own words.
Listening to what patients repeat back to you after using educational tools to teach them an important concept is a surefire way to discover whether or not they correctly comprehended the information given to them. It’s also important for patients to know that the teach-back method is not a test and they have no reason to be worried; it’s just a way for you to ensure that you have properly educated them on the topic involved.
BodySite provides online tools that can optimize patient teach-back. Your patients will have journal feature inside their patient education portal. Here, you can instruct them to make journal entries of what they’ve learned from your provided educational materials, all of which can be shared with you. You can also easily communicate with them through the messaging feature in your account if you’d rather them repeat back what they’ve been taught through HIPAA compliant patient to provider messaging. Additionally, BodySite’s telehealth visits are a great tool for face-to-face patient teach-back! BodySite also offers Group Visits if you wish to perform this in a group setting.
By having your patients repeat back to you what they’ve been taught through the educational tools used, you’ll be able to ensure that they have been complying along with measuring the effectiveness of the tools used. Making this information available to patients in a patient education software will also further help to ensure that even if patients forget what was discussed, they have an easy means to refer back to the information without having to wait for a response from you.
Why is Pre-Educating Patients Important?
Pre-educating patients is greatly important as it better informs your patients on their health and wellness, improves health outcomes and patient engagement, and makes administering wellness plans to your patients a much easier process.
Implementing pre-education strategies is also useful when it comes to preparing patients for their care. The more knowledgeable they are, the more comfortable they’ll feel throughout the process. Because they’ll be well informed on certain subjects, they’ll also be able to get a better sense of self-management since they’ll have an understanding of their health and what’s best for managing it.
Without patient pre-education, your patients may have a difficult time understanding their own health and wellness as well as the steps you are taking to improve and/or maintain it.
If you’re looking for a HIPAA-compliant telehealth solution that allows you to customize and distribute patient education materials, check out BodySite.com. If you’re not already using BodySite, click here to claim your 30-day free trial.
SOURCES:
1. https://www.ahrq.gov/health-literacy/research/tools/index.html