Although I believe you have a great idea about patient’s interacting more with their disease, I am very wary about how the patient would get this disease information. It would be hard for each individual institution to have their own body of knowledge and keep it up to date and accurate. As we both know, the Internet medical information is often more like "mis-information." I don’t know how many times that I have heard people quote Internet medical knowledge to be factual when in fact, it is very bizarre. I like the idea of a "pathophysiology" session for each patient. Remember the old days, when as nurses, we were able to educate our patients regarding their diseases? When we had time to sit at their bedside, and do our "patient teaching" without worrying that we really didn’t have time? I believe all patients have the right to information and details about their disease. I think disease management companies with health educators that are dedicated to assisting the patients with daily disease management are a step in the right direction and hope that someday they become an integral part of our insurance companies offerings. I think we both agree that our patients need quality disease education.
Original Post
August 20, 2009
Title: Patient Interaction with their Disease
Wouldn’t it be cool if patients who are admitted to the hospital for a chronic illness could be connected with an online program that teaches them about their disease? Maybe the patient could check out a laptop for a few hours and then there could be information given to them about their disease. Medications and the important information that goes along with them could be reviewed (this could be tailored specifically to the medications the patient is taking/will be sent home with). Also a little pathophysiology lesson could be given in an interactive exercise that reviewed anatomy and then changes at the cellular level due to the chronic disease. The program could then go into warning signs of an exacerbation of the disease and when to contact their health care provider or call 911. At the end it could talk about how the patient can work to control their illness at home. The program could include print offs of the medications and disease information. If the patient had questions they could take notes and ask their health care provider before their discharge. I think it is so important for a patient to feel that they can have control over their chronic illness. I think that if patients were better educated about their disease processes that hospital admissions/exacerbations would decrease. I firmly believe in educating patients about their illnesses and believe that a user-friendly computer program would greatly benefit patients.
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