A Scalable Program for Customized Patient Education Videos

Patients must make sense of increasingly complex information to navigate their health and the health care system, with limited opportunity to do so in clinical settings. Patient education videos may help to communicate key information, but they are often impersonal and cumbersome to produce or update with new evidence. To address these limitations, a program was developed to facilitate local video creation to deliver targeted information to patients.

The Patient Education Video Program was created at a large urban academic medical center. The medical director and two project managers worked with clinicians and patients to create and disseminate short, single-topic videos organized by segments. The videos educated patients on clinical and service topics such as self-care for low back pain and postoperative protocols. Videos were filmed and modified on a user-friendly mobile device application, then prescribed by sharing a link to the online video platform. Video creators were engaged through a learning collaborative, a physician incentive program, and a residency elective in which trainees designed video-based care redesign projects.

The program was introduced to practice sites across 26 departments. Some 269 videos received 19,713 unique views in a two-year period. In an operational survey, 1,034 (86.0%) of 1,203 viewer responses stated that a video helped them understand their health, medical condition, or treatment plan.

A program to facilitate video creation and dissemination is feasible. Clinicians were most receptive to creating and using videos that addressed direct clinical or operational needs.