Is there Patient Education in the House?
I’ve worked in and around health care education for almost 30 years now, and one thing that stands out is that patients have an insatiable desire to know 1) what’s wrong with them, and 2) how doctors are going to fix it. In educational jargon the event that triggers this desire is called a “teachable moment.” Here’s a case in point.
As a former x-ray technologist I had x-rayed dozens of people with broken arms, but it wasn’t until this past March when I fell off my mountain bike and broke MY arm (see above) that I really wanted to know… well, everything! How would the surgeon fix it, would it hurt, how long would I be off work. In short, I had reached my teachable moment.
When patients reach their teachable moment they turn to any convenient source they can find. Their first choice is their physician, but if he or she is unavailable or doesn’t have adequate patient education materials, they turn to other sources – friends, relatives, Internet sources. This forces patients to act as their own physician by diagnosing their problems and sorting through information which at best may be inaccurate, and at worst completely wrong. Of course, these methods don’t promote the individual physician’s practice or customized information.
Working with leading medical providers in central Pennsylvania such as Jackson Gastroenterology and the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, JPL is addressing this issue through multimedia assisted patient education. We’ve begun creating a series of brief patient education programs that detail what patients can expect, for example, during colonoscopy or gastric bypass surgery. Each module ends with a short quiz to document the patient’s understanding and serves as the basis for informed consent. Quiz results are emailed to the physician’s office where they’re entered into the patient’s medical record.
Research shows that patients who understand their medical condition and have reasonable expectations concerning the outcome of their treatment are less likely to sue their health care provider. This is good. The patient-physician relationship should be characterized by trust based on confidence in the physician’s skills and the accuracy of information provided. Multimedia assisted patient education accomplishes this, and it does it by touching on all the different ways that people learn.
The good news is that my arm is on the mend and I’m riding my bike again. I should have full wrist function back in about 12 months – at least, that’s what I found on the Internet.
(see examples of Multimedia-assisted Patient Education)