A lot of issues associated with patient adherence to care plans stem from the lack of patient education.
Patient education is the practice of informing patients about their health, wellness, treatment plans, potential outcomes, and other information critical to the patient experience.
Invest some time, effort and money into patient education.
This also has added side benefits of patients being more involved in their own care.
Thereby these contribute to additional preventive appointments your existing patients make with your practice.
Patient education can be done by following ways – and none of them are very difficult to do.
The best part is that whatever content you do end up creating for this exercise, can be reused on your practice’s website as well – thereby contributing to your practice growth even more.
Start by preparing free teaching tools organized by each clinical topic and upload either to the patient portal or on your website.
Next step is to provide access to patients to help find the best possible treatment and gain real knowledge.
If you do not have time to create patient education materials, you can leverage online libraries such as ‘iHealthSpot’, ‘Krames online’, that include a library of award-winning patient education related to your specialty.
You can license the library for a small setup fee or monthly licensing fee and make it available on your websites.
If you end up licensing the content, be aware of the distribution fees / agreement from these content providers as well.
You can easily use tools such as informational brochures or other printed materials, Podcasts, YouTube videos, Videos or DVDs, PowerPoint presentations, Posters or charts, models or props, group classes, trained peer educators to achieve the same results as well.
The HUGE benefit of doing these is that not only do they help with patient education, but they directly contribute to your practice’s reputation and credibility as well.
This in turn, markets your practice beyond what you can personally do, plus generates new patient appointments from your existing patients (or patients they refer to your practice).
You can also send regular newsletters via the patient portal for the patient to stay up to date with their healthcare.
Simple, but effective steps to help you find, service, keep patients forever.