Patient Education with Telehealth Software: Empowering Patients to Take Charge of Their Health

Do you know there has always been this one problem which has been around ever since the start of medicine or healthcare practice?

Any guesses?

The answers might vary from medication to patient management or even less number of people choosing healthcare as a profession. While most of you might be even right, given your relevance to the field as a healthcare professional yourself, the problem which we are trying to solve here is patient education.

Patient’s lack of knowledge has often led to disturbance in the treatment processes and oftentimes even non-adherence with the treatment. It’s must feel like going on a bumpy ride at full speed for the healthcare provider, right?

However, as the healthcare industry continues to make progress towards a complete digital landscape, the possible solution to effective patient education and engagement can be found in telehealth app development.

Here, your most logical question can be, ‘But how to improve patient engagement with telehealth for educating them?’

Yes, your question is right; since both patient engagement and telehealth are two different things but complements one another well. It’s integration with self-management tools and effective remote healthcare practices with telehealth software can be an effective way to increase patient engagement and also educate them at the same time.

In this blog, let’s explore how telehealth contribute to patient education and empower health literacy in digital health. Along with that, let’s also have a look at how gracefully patient education and telehealth compliement each other to improve patient outcomes, if done rightly.

Creating Engaging and Accessible Educational Material

Your telehealth software will probably provide many features to the patients other than just video conferencing, especially if you’re choosing custom telehealth app development. Having said that, you can directly give a tab for ‘Educational Library’ for your patients to access educational content.

However, one thing that you need to understand here is that you’re using a digital medium to educate patients; just giving them articles or educational content in text format would not be effective. Curate the educational material in such a way that you can use all the different types of formats. For instance, to explain complex diseases in simple ways, you can use videos or even infographics in articles to make them even more engaging.

Apart from creating engaging content, here are some of the things that you need to consider:

1. Cater to Different Patient Population: Your patient population will consist of different types of patients with different literacy levels. That is the reason you need to create your education material in such a way that it would cater to all diverse populations.

2. Use Relatable Content & Examples: When you use relatable context while explaining certain diseases, it leaves a lasting impact. To achieve this, you can use the power of storytelling, which would not only be more relatable for the audience but also have an impact that would lead to patient empowerment and better adherence.

3. Gamified Content: Incorporate interactive elements to further enhance engagement. For instance, quizzes, polls, and crossword puzzles are effective ways to keep the patient engaged and educated at the same time.

Delivering Timely and Relevant Educational Material

When it comes to creating educational material for your patients, you might get the question, ‘Which diseases, conditions, lifestyle, and health suggestions should you target?’

While all the things mentioned in your questions make us a major part of the patient education material, timely delivery of the content is also important. You don’t want your patients to view the educational material and not find the one that is relevant to them. So, to avoid such complications, here are some of the many things that you should consider:

1. Identify Patient Needs: To answer the question you asked, leverage your EHR systems based on their demographics, health conditions, and care plans. This will give you a clear idea of the conditions your patients are facing and what are the diseases you should target. This can come in handy in chronic disease management since your population might face a wide range of chronic diseases.

2. Be Your Patient’s Teacher: Oftentimes, patients tend not to engage or entertain themselves with educational material. That is the reason you need to be the teacher for your patients. A small act of patient empowerment, like sharing the right content at the right time of their healthcare journey, can make a huge difference.

3. Ongoing Education: Just like humans, diseases also evolve, and so do their treatment plans, etc. That is why many pioneers of healthcare providers emphasize so much on ongoing education. Especially in chronic disease management, where something new is coming up every day. Having said that, update your content accordingly and provide the right information to the patients for quick and holistic care delivery.

4. Create Personalized Patient Education Material: For your chronic care management program, you might cross paths with someone with two rare chronic diseases. In such cases, you can use the patient’s personalized data from the EMR system to create personalized content for patients. This will not only improve health literacy for the patient but also empower them to use virtual care.

Fostering Patient Self-Management

Other than just creating patient education material, you have to go a step further by giving self-management tools. These self-management tools for patients will not only contribute to increasing health literacy but also empowers your patients to take control of their health. Here are a few things in this that you consider to inspire patients in self-managing their health:

1. Progress Tracking Metrics: To equip your patients with knowledge and skills for self-management, you need to give them the necessary tools for tracking their health progress and measuring their goals. EHR integration with your telehealth platform would give them easy access to such information, and during their virtual care visits using the telehealth software, you can explain how to effectively use these self-management tools.

2. Support and Community Support: In case your patients need support from patients like them, give them enough resources to seek support. Give them the option to plan an in-person visit or even communities where they can seek support. These factors are also crucial for patient education, which can lead to better...Click here to learn more