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 patient adherence and improved patient outcomes.

3. Inspire Encouragement: During your telehealth consultations, encourage your patients to ask questions and seek clarification about the diagnosis, care plan, and treatment processes. These are some of the things that lead to better patient engagement and make up most of the part of patient education.

Measuring the Impact of Patient Education

The telehealth software you will be using for care delivery is your gold mine for data that can help you improve your practice. For instance, it can help track patient engagement with educational materials. After all, you do want to know the impact of the educational material you are sharing with your patients. So here are a few things that you can do:

1. Conduct Tests: Patients take their health seriously. Along with that, you assess which patients are in dire need of education, and you can conduct small knowledge and understanding tests. On the basis of that, you can easily share the educational content. However, it does not end there; if the patient is not educated, you can leverage the insights from the software to identify and empower patients with the methods that they find interesting.

2. Measure Health Outcomes and Satisfaction Levels: One of the best and most direct ways to measure the impact of your patient education strategies is to measure the improvements the patient has made. For instance, if the patient has improved health outcomes with a higher satisfaction rate, then take the hint and know that your patient education strategies are working. On the other hand, if one of these two indicators is off the grid, then you need to change the strategy and make it even more engaging and effective.

Building a Supportive Telehealth Ecosystem

Telehealth apps can even be used to provide the necessary support to patients. To build an inclusive ecosystem for your patient population, here are a few things that you can consider:

1. Collaborate with Healthcare Professionals: The first step to building a telehealth ecosystem is to bring healthcare professionals to the platform with whom your patients can communicate. You can collaborate with healthcare providers, patient advocates, and other healthcare educators to educate patients in a more holistic and profound way. Having their webinars and other sessions can boost not only patient engagement but also patient empowerment and education.

2. Start Community Programs: Another thing that you can do with your telehealth platform to boost patient education and engagement is start a community for patients. Here, you can ask your patients to join and connect with each other. This would also be a support system for patients, and they wouldn’t have to go outside looking for support.

3. Patient Education with Telehealth: Patient education is an important aspect of healthcare delivery which the patient should be aware of. For this, in your telehealth platform, you can promote patient education as one of the core components. This would not only help in promoting patient education and health literacy but also empower them to use remote healthcare services.

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