Educating the Patient Part One

It has become so obvious that those of us in health care need to do a better job of educating our patients.  I have written before about our internists and family medicine docs moving exclusively to an office practice.  As a result, when one of their patients is hospitalized, the patient's care transitions to a hospitalist.  All too often, I hear in the community that the Health System is making the patients be seen by the our doctor. 

At the time the change was being made, we asked the physicians to inform their patients as to why they were making such a change.  We drafted letters for them to send to their patients and included brochures on the Hospital Medicine Program.  Effective?  Nope!  We are now running ads about the hospital medicine program in the newspaper, Tweeting about it, and putting it on our Facebook page.  There have been newspaper articles written about it and our staff has even been doing infomercials on the radio.  We have found that it is our responsibility to communicate such changes, and there will be lots to come.