The Evolution of Patient Education

Patient education is an essential part of any practice. Unfortunately, studies have found that 40-80% of medical information that is provided by healthcare practitioners is forgotten by patients immediately [1].

While the reasoning behind this lack of retention is still up for debate, one thing is clear: patients need more education from their healthcare providers between encounters to supplement or clarify the information patients receive during infrequent, in-office visits.

Educating your patients is more than just handing them a piece of paper. Patient education is about giving patients the knowledge they need to make meaningful lifestyle changes to improve health outcomes.

Furthermore, properly educating your patients ensures that they have both the knowledge and the tools they need to be obtain better outcomes and be successful in their health and wellness goals [2]. Using patient education tools in your practice can allow you to provide much better care and education for your patients, which can increase outcomes overall. 

Thanks to innovations in healthcare over the last decade, patient education tools have advanced into new methods and technologies that allow you to elevate the patient education experience in your practice, better monitor your patients’ progress and improve outcomes.

Ahead, we’ll discuss the evolution of traditional patient education tools and what this can mean for the future of your practice and the industry of medicine. 

Traditional Patient Education

Traditional methods of patient education include educational pamphlets, patient handouts, posters, charts, physical models, and in-person oral communication. While these tools have been used for a long time and might have been effective many years back, patients have become much less receptive to these printed and in-person materials. Paper materials typically have a high risk of ending up in the trash can or in a pile of clutter on a desk, along with the information they contain. Oral and physical materials that don’t provide patients with anything to take home are easily forgotten as soon as patients leave the office. 

With this in mind, it’s important to consider the setbacks to strictly providing these traditional materials to your patients. Knowing the difficulties of these methods can give you insight on how pairing traditional patient education tools with evolved methods and technologies can help you to improve patient health outcomes. 

One of these setbacks is the cost of developing and printing physical materials to provide for your patients. Whether it be pamphlets, posters, models, etc., it’s likely to take a good amount of time and money out of your budget. There’s several steps and many accumulated costs included in these processes, especially when it comes to creating your own. Then you have to account for designing, writing, printing, shipping costs, and distributing the materials. Not to mention having to redevelop these materials when the information becomes out of date. 

Something else to consider with traditional educational tools is that they don’t exactly show that the information is personalized for the needs of your patients. They look around and see multiple patients looking at the same resources for generalized information. This has become a rising issue, as the number of patients that want their personal needs to be taken into account rather than following “one size fits all” materials is increasing [3]. A greater sense of personalization gives patients more incentive to retain and use the provided information. 

Fortunately, patient education tools have evolved and now provides a solution for all of these issues. Incorporating these new methods into your practice is simple and will turn these setbacks into comebacks, allowing you to provide your patients with elevated education. 

Digital Tools for Patient Education

As the world around us continues to advance technologically throughout the digital age, it’s becoming less of a luxury and more of a necessity to offer evolved digital versions of traditional educational tools to your patients. Some examples include educational videos, one-on-one telehealth visits, group telehealth visits, electronic health records, and digital prescriptions for medication, supplements, exercise, and more. 

All of these digital tools that have evolved from traditional patient education can provide solutions for your practice that the traditional methods cannot. For example, educational videos can keep your patients engaged throughout the entire duration of the video, which makes them more likely to retain the provided information. You can also provide them with these videos outside of their visit, so if the information is starting to slip from their memory, they can easily pull it up online and rewatch. They’re much more accessible to patients than physical tools in the office. 

The ability for you and your patients to store needed information has also been a huge improvement in the evolution of patient education. Digital storage allows for easy access to educational materials, encounter notes from in-person or telehealth visits, and any other materials you see fit. This can also include electronic health records (EHRs), which are real-time, patient-centered records that make information available instantly and securely to authorized users [4]. These can contain a patient’s medical history, diagnoses, medications, treatment plans, immunization dates, allergies, radiology images, and laboratory and test results that your patients can access safely whenever they please. 

Having this information easily accessible for your patients through these digital tools can also help when it comes to prescribing them supplements, medication, exercise, or anything else they might need. If you’re prescribing a patient with a supplement to help reduce stress, you can easily do that digitally along with sending them the educational information they will need about that supplement, how to use it, other actions they can take to help while taking the supplement, and plenty more information that can be useful. 

With the technological advances that have been made in the world of patient education, you can work towards better health outcomes through digital patient education tools. 

Automated Patient Education

While digital tools for patient education have been developing over the years, so has automated patient education. Automated patient education takes these digital tools a step further by providing patients with a care program that disseminates daily which eliminates the need for guess work on behalf of the patient and vastly improves patient compliance.  Patients get a bite-sized and manageable amount of information every day about what they need to pay attention to.  It’s like having the doctor in their pocket.

Putting your patients on a customized care program can also open up the opportunity for you to utilize many tracking functionalities such as the ability to track food, activity, body metrics, completed tasks, and more. You can also share many resources and visuals throughout customized programs in order to give your patients that personalized experience that they’re typically looking for. Any information that you digitally release to patients through automated care plans can also 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. 

Automated care plans serve the purpose of both educating your patients and guiding them through what to eat, do, and track every day, so they don’t have to figure out how to achieve their health goals all by themselves. Automated patient education will bring a whole new technological (and efficient) meaning to patient education so you can have healthier patients and practice better too.

The Future of Patient Education

If proper education is not provided for your patients, they 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. The more knowledge they have on their health care, the more comfortable they’ll feel throughout the process. Since they’ll be well informed on the necessary 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.

With the vast evolution of patient education that has taken place over the years, it’s becoming more and more likely that adoption rates amongst providers and patients will increase. The days of strictly traditional tools such as pamphlets and posters are long gone, so providers are going to have to make some changes in how they facilitate the transfer of information to their patients. 

Even if some don’t want to go fully digital, these evolved educational tools can just be an addition to use in tandem with traditional tools. The future of patient education is already upon us, and the tools it provides can revolutionize your practice. 

Remote Patient Care Platform

The addition of remote patient care is a great investment that will create many benefits for you and your patients. Utilizing digital resources alongside traditional patient education tools will allow you to better care for 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, remote patient monitoring, connected devices, simple practice management, scheduling, billing and many other ways to visit with and 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.

 

SOURCES: 

1. Kessels, Roy P C. “Patients’ Memory for Medical Information.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, The Royal Society of Medicine, May 2003, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC539473/.

2. “Patient Education.” American Family Physician, 1 Oct. 2000, https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2000/1001/p1712.html.

3. Minvielle, Etienne. “Toward Customized Care.” International Journal of Health Policy and Management, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, 1 Mar. 2018, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5890073/. 

4. “What Is an Electronic Health Record (EHR)?” HealthIT.gov, 10 Sept. 2019, https://www.healthit.gov/faq/what-electronic-health-record-ehr.