As a dedicated PA-C, I am passionate about how best to provide better patient care. And I wish to collaborate with you, my peers, about how to advance our professional mission — in an on-going dialog about innovations at point of care.
To start, I’d like to invite you to try out a phenomenal new digital patient education tool that rocked my world — so much so that I am now the Liberate Health PA Ambassador (for full disclosure!)…and more importantly, enables PA’s who want to try digital at point of care with their patients.
There are a growing number of medical care management Apps available today – but let me offer you 11 reasons why I think you should try Liberate Health for iPad…
1. To improve your office workflow. Liberate organizes your patient educational materials in a simple and accessible format, available to you in one location on your iPad;
2. To improve patient outcomes and treatment compliance. Our proprietary, enhanced educational materials use visuals and plain language to explain disease states and treatment plans relevant to your patients;
3. To empower your patients by offering them the necessary tools to become health literate. Proper educational framing does wonders in minimizing the stigmatization of not fully understanding endless disease states — and the associated barriers to care that follow;
4. To liberate yourself from the negative effects of ineffective educational attempts, and the frustrations from your unheard and/or forgotten discussions between you and your patients;
5. To better fulfill and manage Meaningful Use criteria. These include providing patients with timely electronic access to their healthcare information, sending them reminders for preventative and follow-up care, and offering them educational resources tailored specifically to them;
6. To provide patients with quicker access to lab and other test results via an email sent directly to them through a HIPPA-complaint patient portal, helping to alleviate patient anxiety over pending results and/or forgotten results,
7. To decrease the likelihood of any patient losing important information formerly on scraps of paper — such as detailing procedures, dosage scheduling, and pre-op prep orders;
8. To better facilitate communication between patients and their caregivers, spouses, and/or other family members about diagnoses, treatment plans and other office visit specifics. Liberate offers patients the opportunity to fully disclose, on a voluntary basis, accurate and complete information regarding their healthcare to their loved ones. This removes any ambiguity that is often present about one’s expected disease course, treatment plan, and other treatment specifics, such as participation in research studies;
9. To better help us and our patients follow changes in their conditions. For example, by providing a patient with an emailed picture of his rash today, and then comparing that same picture to changes over the course of the next week…w a cellulitis spreads or improves, how an atypical nevi changes, etc.;
10. To offer patients a tool that allows them to listen to their office visit over and over again after the fact in the familiarity of their own home. This chance to review (however often desired) helps them to better recall details of their office visit that they may not have otherwise heard and/or remembered. This also decreases the stress of information overload, by exchanging that overload for a better understanding of their own healthcare;
11. And finally, to help the students in your office become better medical educators. By giving them a tool to serve as a framework in facilitating meaningful, thorough, and easy to understand dialogue with patients, Liberate enhances your medical students’ confidence in communicating with patients.
So, I challenge you to download the Liberate App onto your iPad and play around with it. See how quickly incorporating this tool into your everyday practice will be helpful for you and/or your patients and students.
You can familiarize yourself with the tool by going through every pertinent Condition deck by yourself before presenting any of the information to your patients. Make sure that you are familiar with the material and that it makes sense to you. Make sure that it’s something you can use to compliment your teaching style. You don’t want to be stumbling through the slides. You don’t want to be reading them verbatim either. This was not the intent behind the creation of these decks. Instead, the idea is to use the decks as powerful educational resources for you to help communicate to your patients so they best understand and adhere to your diagnostic care.
In the blog posts that follow, I will expand on these bullet points to help you get the most out of using the Liberate App.
