Patient education in modern healthcare is a great tool to gain positive outcome from your patient’s care path. In this brief write up, I am sharing some of the important aspects that one should consider while building a patient education solution.
Make it simple and more visual: Most often a patient will understand a topic by recognizing visual elements. How intuitively one can design the experience for patients will make an education session interesting.
It should be interactive and a fun tool: Patient education should happen in sessions making each session interactive towards the end.
Evidence based education: While you are trying to build a repository of education material, it is important for patients if their education sessions are based on evidence. Present more data and allow peer patients to talk about their healing process.
Mobile access: Patient should be able to access education sessions anytime, anywhere using mobile devices. Such tools provide flexibility and are definitely more engaging. While mobility is an important component of accessibility; my recommendation is to allow smaller sessions in “one go”.
Education to prevent: Patient should interact easily with such solution to prevent them from problems. For example, if you are building a BOT who can talk with you to provide solutions or recommend possible causes of any symptom.
Engage to complete: For a patient within a care setting, completing the sessions are simpler and often a part of protocol; while a patient who is not a part of care setting, the sessions should be supported with effective engaging experience bonded with alerts.
Educate to participate: While educating a patient is important, it is equally important to empower patients with informed decision making. Patients who participate more in the process often shows positive outcomes.
Looking at the future I feel, patients who are more educated are more informed and have a better control on a specific disease. Needless to say applications that help in self-healing will be in the rise however, at the same time more regulations will impact the delivery and governance of such applications.