Patient education is a crucial aspect of engaging patients along their cancer journey, but it can also be very time consuming and difficult to do well. As part of a project to improve this, we identified 4 major issues with the state of oncology education as we saw it:
- High cost. Whether the cost is in the resources required to create educational material, or the financial expense of purchasing educational material, it can add up quickly.
- Out of date or incomplete data. It’s hard to stay up to date when treatments change rapidly, especially when education is delivered in paper format.
- Lack of patient specificity. A binder full of general oncology information may include everything the patient needs, but it’s not easy to wade through all that info to get to the relevant parts.
- Problems with delivery. Paper based education is still common, and when electronic education is used, it’s often hard to track.
Through a partnership with the oncology education leaders at OncoLink, we’re ready to unveil the next wave of oncology patient education. A library of over 500 articles, including over 200 drug fact sheets, is now part of ECS and these materials are kept up to date by the OncoLink experts. Materials are easily assigned based on the patient’s diagnosis and stage of care, and can be delivered online through he portal, or printed along with the care plan. In addition to this comprehensive library, it’s now possible to add custom material to provide patients with information on local cancer resources.
This feature is available in the next release of Equicare’s software in spring 2016. Contact us to learn more about oncology education, and take a look at the video below for a preview of how it works.