Optimizing Emergency Aftercare With Mobile Video Prescriptions

Emergency department (ED) visits have increased by 25% over the past decade. 85% of these patients are discharged, and the standard of care is to provide each patient/caregiver with written instructions that highlight how to care for a particular illness at home and signs to return to the hospital. Compliance with such ED discharge instructions is limited, leading to suboptimal medical care and unnecessary return visits to the ED. Inadequate health literacy, language disparities, and poor comprehension of written discharge information contribute to this problem. This health gap is more prevalent in children of young parents, low-income families, and minority populations where a disproportionate number of patients visit the ED for non-emergent care, often because of a lack of health education. The ED environment is chaotic and distracting and suboptimal to educate patients. Such education is best accomplished where aftercare occurs-in the home, but many patients lack direction and motivation to seek reliable sources of focused health education.

healthEworks LLC has developed Video Prescriptions™ - concise 3-5 minute video modules specific to the most common discharge diagnoses that patients receive in the ED. Further work is needed to develop a professional, diagnosis-specific product. These videos will feature Dr. Christina Johns, an emergency physician who specializes in delivering health information on camera. Each video will be interactive, high definition, designed for small screen size, such as for a smartphone or laptop computer. Each video prescription™ will highlight the transition from hospital to home and focuses on what the diagnosis means, how to treat it at home, and which signs should prompt the patient to return to the ED or seek urgent care. A HIPAA-compliant tablet-based platform will link ED patients with their personalized video education, establishing an innovative system of post-discharge information sharing.

The use of video prescriptions™ will improve patient health education for the 100 million patients who are discharged from U.S. ED's annually. This technology is particularly applicable for hospitals that face increasing pressures to provide performance measures for hospital discharge.

Video prescriptions™ will be utilized by ED patients, regardless of socioeconomic status, will improve patient satisfaction and reduce unnecessary ED return visits.

• Specific Aim 1: Demonstrate patient utilization of video prescriptions Criteria for acceptance: a hyperlink click rate of greater than 70%
• Specific Aim 2: Demonstrate improved health outcomes. Criteria for acceptance: a reduction in return visits by 10%
• Specific Aim 3: Demonstrate quality of video content by showing improved patient satisfaction scores. Criteria for acceptance: improvement in patient satisfaction scores by 20%