Developing patient education programs with multimedia technology incorporating patient feedback into program design

The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston has been the site of a three year project to develop a unique set of computer-based health promotion programs for patients in community-based settings. The Healthy Touch Series is a collection of four interactive multimedia programs that were produced to provide health promotion information to underserved groups on topics related to maternal-infant health. The programs have bilingual audio tracks in English and Spanish and run on a CD-ROM platform with touch-screen control. Use of the technology with a large group of patients led to many modifications and alternations. Formative evaluation results review the key concepts we learned.