A Digital Point-of-care Solution to Improve Patient Experience and Adherence: Instant Personalized Product Handouts

Background: To adhere to care plans, patients need to know which products to purchase, where to obtain them, how much they cost, and how to use them. However, clinicians’/caregivers’ busy schedules and lack of easily available information are frequent obstacles to meeting these needs satisfactorily. We aimed to develop a solution to quickly generate customized product handouts with this information for patients. 

Method: Using the Design Thinking methodology, the solution was developed as a module within a clinical/reimbursement decision support web-application* for wound care and hyperbaric clinicians, as follows: 
●    Clinician needs/desired features were identified through interviews. 
●    Module was developed with robust programming language♥, library♦, framework♣, and APIs❖. 
●    Patients/clinicians of 4 wound clinics completed 2 rounds of evaluation, and feedback was incorporated into the final version. 

Results: The final module instantly generates patient-centric, customized product handouts on over 1000 different wound care products. 

To generate a handout, clinician chooses a product, enters patient’s ZIP code and selects desired type of information. The handout is automatically populated with selected information, which may include: product description, DME suppliers (local, online and/or recommended by clinician), custom note, pricing, Medicare coverage/co-payment. Clinicians can bookmark, print and/or email handouts to patients/caregivers. 

Upon initial evaluation, 100% of the surveyed clinicians indicated they would use the module “daily”/“weekly”. 80% indicated it meets their needs “very well” (versus “moderately”/“not as much”). 

Handouts were incorporated into clinical workflow, and a second evaluation conducted:
●    From patients’ perspective, handouts were “helpful”/“very helpful” (average score: 4.2/5, 1:“not helpful”, 5:“very helpful”) 
●    Clinicians found that 87.5% of handouts shared with patients were “useful”/“very useful” in increasing adherence to the care plan. 

Conclusion: A digital point-of-care solution that generates customized product handouts with clinical, coverage, pricing and supplier information was developed. It may significantly improve patient experience/adherence while saving clinicians’ time.