Difference between revisions of "Readability of patient discharge instructions with and without the use of electronically available disease-specific templates"

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== Background and Significance ==
 
== Background and Significance ==
At the time of discharge patients have many concerns and may not recall verbal instructions. Typically in US hospitals discharge instructions are given in the written format. Due to low health literacy, many US adults may not understand these written discharge instructions. In this article authors have retrospective reviewed the discharge instructions given to the patients for their readability.
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At the time of discharge patients have many concerns and may not recall verbal instructions. Typically in US hospitals discharge instructions are given in the written format. Due to low health literacy, many US adults may not understand these written discharge instructions. In this article authors have retrospective reviewed the discharge instructions given to the patients for their readability through the use of templates in  [[EMR|Electronic Health Records (EHRs)]].
  
 
=== Materials and Methods ===
 
=== Materials and Methods ===

Revision as of 01:40, 6 October 2015

This is a review of the article "Readability of patient discharge instructions with and without the use of electronically available disease-specific templates".

Background and Significance

At the time of discharge patients have many concerns and may not recall verbal instructions. Typically in US hospitals discharge instructions are given in the written format. Due to low health literacy, many US adults may not understand these written discharge instructions. In this article authors have retrospective reviewed the discharge instructions given to the patients for their readability through the use of templates in Electronic Health Records (EHRs).

Materials and Methods

A retrospective cohort analysis was done in this study. The study was conducted at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) a large tertiary care center in Boston, Massachusetts. The subjects were randomly chosen from an adult, 18 and over population who were discharged home and received discharge instructions.

BWH implemented a web based “discharge module” in 2011. For this module, discharge instruction templates were created for specific diagnoses and obtaining the feedback from the appropriate specialties. At the time of discharge physicians were free to write their own discharge instructions even if a specific template was available, use these templates as such, modify these templates.

245 random subjects were chosen for this study. Out of this sample 233 were eligible. Data was analyzed for readability by using the Microsoft Office word 2007 for Flesch Reading Ease Level (FREL) scale and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) scale.

The subjects were divided into two groups, one group consisted of clinician initiated discharge instructions. This group was divided into two subgroups, diagnosis specific discharge instruction template was available but not used and no diagnosis specific template was available. The other group consisted of subjects who received pre-developed diagnosis specific discharge instructions with or without modifications.

Results

Data analysis revealed that the pre-developed templates scored better in readability analysis. This pattern persisted even when the subjects, who received clinician initiated discharge instructions were removed from the final analysis, in which there was no diagnosis specific template was available. It was done to remove a potential bias that the lack of diagnosis specific template may mean that the illness was complex.

Discussion

In this study, authors found that pre-developed diagnosis specific discharge instructions even if modified resulted in better readability. This effect persisted even when after removing the subgroup from analysis for whom no diagnosis specific discharge template was available.

My comments

This study shows that it is possible to develop diagnosis specific discharge instructions that can be customized to meet the needs of a specific patient. However, it required a group of clinicians with the help of subject experts to develop such templates. It is not clear from this study whether this resulted in better outcomes. However, it makes sense to provide written helpful discharge instructions that can be easily understood by patients with inadequate literacy.


Reference:

[1]
  1. Mueller, S. K., Giannelli, K., Boxer, R., & Schnipper, J. L. (07/01/2015). Journal of the american medical informatics association : JAMIA: Readability of patient discharge instructions with and without the use of electronically available disease-specific templates BMJ. doi:10.1093/jamia/ocv005 http://dx.doi.org.ezproxyhost.library.tmc.edu/10.1093/jamia/ocv005