Integrate Patient Education

1. How important is healthcare literacy?

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) defines health literacy as, “the degree to which individuals can obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions.”

Care providers can evaluate health literacy during the patient’s office visit or through an assessment form that can be completed before their appointments. Clinicians can also provide alternative ways to support patients when they face challenges with health literacy. Studies reveal that patients with lower health literacy are less likely to participate in the digital care coordination journey than patients with higher health literacy.

2. How can teach-back help improve patient engagement?

Teach-back methods are proven to be effective and are recommended by care providers more often. A typical teach-back method goes like this—where the doctor explains the self-management techniques to the patient and is then asked to explain it back to the doctor, so the patient understands it. This will help physicians understand the patients’ level of understanding and when a patient has challenges with it, physicians can recommend alternative methods and procedures to support patient care.

The ultimate goal of teach-back is to ensure that the patients and their families have understood their health regimes and adhere to them to improve the health outcomes. This can be a great way to improve doctor-patient collaboration, increase patient engagement, enhance the patient experience and drive patient outcomes.

3. How can you personalize instructions?

There are numerous patient engagement tools from digital care coordination solutions to manual methods that doctors use to accelerate patient education strategies. Individual preferences of these patient engagement tools change with patients, and doctors need to work with patients to identify their preferred channels of education and engagement.

As per MedlinePlus, a health information resource from the National Institute of Health and the National Library of Medicine, these are the commonly used Patient Education Materials:

It is critical that clinicians understand patient preferences to support patient adoption of education materials. Clinicians and patients should consider a customized model as per their lifestyles and integrate it into their patient engagement solutions.

Also, clinicians need to be transparent about the information the patients need to know than what they might want to know. Providing repetitive information could result in unnecessary confusion and information overload; hence clinicians need to prioritize the information to be shared with patients—to improve efficiency.

4. How can you use digital solutions to transform care journeys?

Digital patient engagement solutions provide an organized and interactive way of educating patients, storing education materials and seamlessly engaging patients to actively participate in their care coordination journey. Modernized patient engagement software are strategically designed to simplify patient education and improve patient access to health information.

Patient management portals are equipped with numerous features that allow patients to access their test reports, medical histories and critical other health information. From Appointment reminder solutions, referral management solutions, patient education, intake management, and patient referral to patient feedback, patient self-scheduling, automated waitlists and guided care pathways, care coordination software play a significant part in accelerating patient education and engagement to drive superior patient experience.