Overview
Online Patient education is the process of educating individuals about a disease, its procedures, and treatments in order to make informed decisions about their health via digital channels such as youtube, facebook, website etc.
Patient Education not only educates patients about the diseases but also aims to improve health by encouraging compliance with medical treatment regimens and promoting healthy lifestyles altogether.
As per the American Journal of Medicine, patient education significantly improves compliance with medication across a broad range of conditions and disease severities. Lack of compliance is associated with poor clinical outcomes, increased hospitalizations, lower quality of life, and higher overall health costs.
With 72% of internet users looking for health information online, there’s no question patients turn to the internet to find a doctor or watch how a procedure is done. Let your website and social media handles be the source of that information. Make sure your website and social media handles such as Facebook, Youtube channel provides the information and the videos that patients are looking for. Video content allows your patients to better understand a procedure and improves patient satisfaction.
Why is Patient Education Important?
A patient’s misunderstanding of a condition and its care can result in non-compliance to a doctor’s recommendations or diagnosis which causes significant and adverse affected outcomes. The more clearly a disease is understood, the more likely it is that an individual will be comfortable with their care and adhere to necessary regimens.
Online patient education results in better patient understanding:
- Videos increase people’s understanding of a product or service by 74%
- 40 percent of learners respond better to visual information than text alone
- Visuals have been found to improve learning by up to 400 percent
How can patient education be made effective?
The Internet is abound with dubious sites providing “medical facts”. Doctors often complain that their patients bring sheets of printouts from the internet to explain their symptoms or support their self-diagnosis of health conditions. A simple headache can be made to seem like a symptom of brain tumour, causing most uninformed readers anxiety and sleepless nights.
This is one of the main reasons why physicians and health providers owe it to their patients to provide the correct facts. Explaining complex medical terminology in a simple manner will ease their mind, prevent self-treatment and avoid complications from wrongful diagnosis.
Here are some of the ways to impart patient education effectively:
- Use technology
Pamphlets, charts and images only go so far to help patients. Printed information is never retained with the patient and is likely to be filed away and never looked at again. Using technology, like creating a space for informative articles on your patient portal or maybe using a health communication channel on the waiting area TV is quicker and more effective at getting the message across to your patients. Similarly getting high quality 3D videos on surgeries and procedures on youtube channel, website results in much better online patient education and engagement.
- Get rid of the jargon
The aim of providing information to patients is to simplify complex terminology and medical jargon. Therefore, you should use simple language and visual content such as 3D Anatomy, Procedures Videos, Surgery Videos, Visual Treatment Options to explain complicated health conditions and their implications. It helps to be objective when discussing medical procedures by explaining the benefits and risks associated with them to allow patients to make an informed decision.
- Use social media
Social media is a great medium to post helpful and informative health tips. You can also choose to create discussion groups that could be illness-specific, gender-specific or age-specific to categorize your audience in order to better refine the information that you distribute among groups.
- Get feedback from patients
Feedback from patients will help you customize your health educational material. Interest in health concerns vary so it is important to check in with your patients occasionally to ensure that your efforts aren’t in vain. Online questionnaires and feedback forms can help you get your patients’ opinions.
