Discharge instructions play an important role in helping patients manage their care after a visit. More than 72% of patients report that after-visit summaries help them manage next steps, yet studies have found that 78% of patients had incomplete understanding of their instructions. Shorter, simpler, more accessible discharge instructions can increase patient understanding by up to 22%.
For Mandy Hatch, a nurse and clinical decision support informatics specialist at Indianapolis-based Community Health Network, finding patient content and discharge instructions that were more focused and concise without losing the effectiveness of their message was a vital part of improving patient engagement at her health system.
“We’re always looking for ways to clean up that after-visit summary,” Hatch says. “You lose people after page two. We’re always looking for something that’s more comprehensive in one document with more pictures. I cannot tell you how much people want pictures!”
For Hatch and her colleagues at Community Health Network, the answer was to switch to UpToDate® Patient Engagement to achieve the efficiency they needed while still providing illustrated, diverse, and evidence-based content, designed to be easier to consume for patients and positively impact their behaviors.
Choosing the right patient education: Quality and workflow matter
Hatch has been a nurse for around two decades, moving into analysis and management of hospital IT systems about 10 years ago. She works specifically on assessing and setting up workflows for various components of Community Health Network’s Epic EHR.
When Hatch assessed patient education use across her organization, she found that workflow friction was limiting adoption. The previous solution opened patient materials in a new tab rather than keeping clinicians in their workflow. “They don’t want a new tab. That’s just not how they wanted their workflow to go,” she says.
Some clinicians bypassed the solution altogether, leaving Epic to find materials in the health system’s intranet resource library. The multi-click process not only disrupted workflow, but also required printing lengthy after-visit summaries which did not automatically write back to the patient chart, creating a reliance on clinicians to document which materials had been assigned. “At that point, we decided, hey, maybe we should look at just switching vendors,” Hatch says.
Because Community Health Network was already using UpToDate® clinical decision support (CDS) throughout the health system, clinicians were familiar with the patient education content available within that resource. Based on their feedback and requests, Hatch says the most fitting option for the health system was to switch to UpToDate Patient Engagement solutions.
“We had a lot of complaints” about the previous patient engagement solution, she explains. “Now that we switched, I hear from clinicians that the UpToDate documents are so much more comprehensive. You get so much more relevant information in one document, as opposed to needing four or five documents for the same topic. They like [UpToDate] instructions better.”
Discharge instructions made easier to use for clinicians
UpToDate Patient Engagement has also proved “much easier” for clinicians to use within Epic, Hatch says. Community Health Network embedded patient-facing materials within the EHR’s Discharge Navigator workflow. She notes that it allows clinicians to select any items they want without needing to link out the library anymore. Selected items can be previewed and automatically added to the discharge summary. Importantly, “there is always a snapshot of every after-visit summary in Epic to prove what was given when they discharged,” she says.
Additionally, her team embedded a direct link to the UpToDate CDS tool above the patient instructions workflow so clinicians can link to UpToDate to support their decision-making or allow them to search the online patient education tool if they prefer.
Hatch reports that clinicians “are really happy about the embedded CDS tool,” which now includes single sign-on functionality, saving users from having to log in every time they access UpToDate. The health system logged 87,000 instances of Infobutton usage in four months.
Making patient education resources accessible on MyChart
Community Health Network deploys a variety of UpToDate Patient Engagement programs as well as custom-made organizational materials through MyChart. UpToDate resources have helped reduce the number of custom materials that need to be made to fulfill clinician needs. UpToDate also enables Hatch’s team to deploy changes to content universally instead of manually updating every program bundle and library. All of this saves internal teams’ time.
One of the biggest advantages of embedding UpToDate Patient Engagement educational leaflets into their Epic system, is that it enables clinicians to load all after-visit summaries and assigned programs to a patient’s MyChart account, Hatch says.
“Paper is paper. They might set it down and lose it,” she explains. “We have so many MyChart users. Now they have their exact discharge paperwork in their MyChart so they can always refer back to it.”
That functionality is a significant component of what won over Community Health Network stakeholders, Hatch says. “People can see that we are doing everything in Epic. And it actually makes a difference, because the patient has what they need they get home.”
Explore what other customers have to say about UpToDate® Patient Engagement and other Wolters Kluwer solutions.