Get your patient instructions followed with no extra time or effort

When your patient instructions just don’t get through.

Recently at a conference, a surgeon asked a question as old as time: how can she help patients better remember her post-op instructions?  

And to be perfectly clear – this surgeon had put in the work.

 She reviewed patient instructions in the pre-op area, the nurses reviewed them again before discharge and she had updated instruction sheets with everything written down. She’d done more than many to combat the up to 50% of information that patients don’t remember.

Despite all of this, patients were still telling her no one told them to take Tylenol and Advil for pain. 🤯Understandably she asked – what else could she possibly do?

Pro tip from a colleague: get your patient instructions on their phone.

Visiting speaker Dr. Islur shared a brilliant tip: when you review your post-op instructions, get patients (or their families) to make voice recording on their smartphones.

So simple. So incredibly brilliant.

There are 3 big benefits here:

1. Patients (+/- their families) can revisit the recording
2. The “no one ever told me” becomes non-existent
3. Making the recording requires no extra time, energy or steps for you. Win-Win-Win.

And this pro tip isn’t limited to surgery. Any procedure, medication with a certain protocol or specific steps to take in the case of X scenario are candidates.

Hesitant to be recorded? Remember these conversations are ones that you’re already having.

You’re giving the patient more resources and information – which is widely considered by most medico-legal organizations to be a very good thing.

Plus – since this recording is the verbal version of the information on your instruction sheets, you’re giving patients the same information you want them to know in a second form.  

Dr. Islur added that this is particularly helpful for cases where the post-op care is more unique due to patient or procedure factors. Or in the cases where a combination of procedures would necessitate several instruction sheets.

(Which is a much more elegant way to communicate nuance than my usual scratches and scribbles on the standard instruction sheet.)

Voice recording your patient instructions could benefit patients and your practice.

If you operate, do procedures or have processes for patients to follow – consider giving this a try. It takes no extra time or energy on your part.

Who wouldn’t want patients to follow your instructions better? Not to mention how great it would be to save the time and headache of the “no one told me” conversation.

This exchange at the conference is great reminder and example that there are so many tried and true practice management ideas out there. But outside of our immediate circles, we don’t have a way to share and much less implement them ourselves. We don’t need to re-invent the wheel every time. Which is the reason DuplicateMeMD was started in the first place.