How to Create Actionable and Engaging Patient Education

Communicating health information isn't easy. There's a lot of information to impart. There's also a lot of variation in how much people know about their body, conditions, treatments, and procedures.

Regardless of education, many people don’t understand or know how to act on health information (called health literacy). They’re often embarrassed to admit this.

Illness, pain and the stress of navigating a complex health system can also make it difficult to take in, understand, process, and remember information.

What can you do to help?

As social and emotional beings, people need to know that their participation in their care or recovery is important, possible, and safe.

People need resources that

1) are easy to understand and act on

2) help them make sense of their situation or instructions, and

3) are empathetic

People are more likely to trust resources that show empathy, warmth, and competence. Resources should show understanding of people’s lived experiences and concerns.

The best resources help people:

• Communicate with their healthcare team

• Formulate questions

• Think through personal goals and preferences

What are the best ways to design empathic, patient-centered resources and ensure they’re easy for people to understand and act on?

Continue to learn!

The Gold Standard:

Include patients!

Including patients in the design process is the best way to ensure resources make sense, address their concerns, and speak to their lived experiences.

Feedback from patients and their families is the key to creating resources that meet people where they are so they can have agency. Agency means feeling capable of choice and action.

First: Learn about their information needs. Interview patients to understand their questions, what they wish they’d known and the reality of their diverse experiences.

Talk with patients and families who have been living with a condition or had a procedure. Also talk with people who are newly diagnosed or about to have a procedure.

Testing resources with patients is essential for human-centered design. Don’t feel daunted. It’s often fun and enlightening, not onerous. Any feedback is valuable.

Anyone can have difficulty comprehending health information. Follow the universal precaution: assume everyone has difficulty. Use plain language and simplified visuals.

Plain language best practices:

• Avoid medical jargon

• Use conversational voice and short sentences. Don’t condescend or talk down

• Use numerals (7 vs. seven)

Tools that assess reading grade level fail to capture many other barriers to clear communication. The best way to ensure clarity is having patients help design and test resources.

Sometimes people need to become familiar with a complex medical term like “hysterectomy.” Also, shorter words aren't always better - “stool” is easily misunderstood as a chair versus feces.

If a medical term is needed, start with the plain language and then show the medical term.

"Surgery is done to remove the womb (uterus)."

In print materials, pronunciation guides help people sound words out. This way they recognize terms when clinicians say them. And it helps them say these terms correctly to their care team.

Most people have trouble understanding numbers. So, only use them when essential and provide context when you do. Avoid percentages, fractions and probabilities. Don’t make people do math!

When it’s essential to communicate how likely or rare a risk or outcome is, use a matrix of icons, an icon array. It improves understanding and reduces bias.

Here's another way to design more empathic, patient-centered resources: Don't just give a recommendation or instruction, explain why.

People don’t blindly follow instructions. When things don’t make sense, people make up explanations. It may not be enough to say: "Don’t smoke before surgery: it causes healing problems..."

People often don’t understand, for example, that bones need a good blood supply to heal well and that anything with nicotine affects blood flow.

Also explain how. How should people with heart failure reduce salt? People often think avoiding salt means avoiding the salt shaker. They don’t realize sauces, soup, and soda are high in salt.

Use visuals. Art can provide context, help clarify, and reduce necessary text.

Orient people to where something is in the body. Animating? Go from outside in.

Medical art should be friendly and diagrammatic. Realistic art can be upsetting. Leave out details that don’t help orient or explain. Always test art with patients and iterate.

Have people of varying educational and cultural backgrounds review your resource while you are creating it. This usually takes a few iterations.

Create feedback loops. This makes it easy to update and improve a resource. Many platforms, like Lifeology and Docola, can deliver content while tracking and gathering feedback.

Design best practices vary depending on the type of resource. Print and text resources have different challenges and best practices than multimedia or video with narration.