A Clearer Path Forward: Improving How We Educate Patients

The Context

Throughout residency, one of the patterns I noticed again and again was how much information patients were expected to retain after an office visit. Ophthalmology appointments, as do all other medical specialties, can involve multiple nuanced diagnoses, multi-step treatment plans, and careful follow-up timelines. Yet at the end of the encounter, most patients walked out with only a verbal explanation, and nothing to refer back to. This was most evident at the VA, where our electronic medical software had no option to provide patient information. I often found myself sketching out personalized instructions on scratch paper or typing short summaries into Microsoft Word and then printing it just so my patients had something tangible to reference at home. It was clear that patients valued this, but creating these summaries manually was time consuming, lacked standardization, and very inefficient.