Plugging In

Will Shannon find her patient education solution in the cloud?

“Aren’t we the modern family!” Mike laughed, looking around the room. His wife was at her laptop and he was at his, their youngest daughter was playing a game on a tablet, and the other kids were texting friends on their phones. The TV was on, too, so there were more screens active than people.

Shannon looked at him doubtfully. “What do you mean?”

“Look at all these screens! We’re all plugged into our devices — together in the room, but each of us hooked up to our own electronic stuff.”

“You’re right. But I think I might have made a breakthrough on the patient education issue.” Shannon scooted closer and showed Mike her screen. “See these 3-D images and animations?”

The older kids came close to see. “Awesome!” their son said.

“It’s awesome, all right — the largest library of 3-D animations of medical conditions anywhere, and there are lots of exercise and rehab images, too.”

“So,” Mike said, “the idea is that you can show these to patients and they’ll understand their conditions better?”

“Their conditions, the treatments we want to use, the exercises they should be doing at home — everything! When they understand, they’ll be more likely to follow through.”

“Also,” their son put in, “you’ll be the coolest PT in town. They could make a game out of these.”

Shannon laughed. “They don’t have a game, but we can email them a custom report so they have the information they need at home in between visits. Plus, it’s browser-based, so we can use it all through the practice. That means we’ll all be giving them a consistent message, so there’ll be less chance of confusion — and less chance that they’ll feel they have to go somewhere else for information.”

“This is impressive,” Mike agreed. “I can see that this could be a selling point for you.”

“It’s also integrated with practice management software, so it can be part of our regular workflow, not more work for us.”

“It makes sense. This is clearly a good use of technology. Now maybe we as a family should unplug and do something together.”

Will Shannon find her patient education solution in the cloud?

Disclaimer: For HIPAA compliance, all characters appearing in this post are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons or actual events is purely coincidental.