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Why Patient Education Videos are Beneficial for Physicians and Pharma

Besides being a place where they sit and anticipate their turn to see a physician, there are multiple uses for waiting rooms. Seeing how patients are mostly idle, they can be presented with a range of content to inform and educate them before they take a step into the office. One of those content types is patient education videos for the waiting room.

Here’s how you can use those videos to benefit physicians and effectively improve patients’ health outcomes.

Improve patient outcomes

Health literacy is one of the biggest issues in pharma since the dawn of time. Poorly informed patients don’t adhere to their treatments and as a result, put themselves in danger. When patients don’t adhere, physicians have a difficult time doing their job as well.

With patient education videos for the waiting room, patients can get informed about their diagnosis, disease, and treatment. A better-informed patient can make better decisions about their health.

Save physicians’ time

A large portion of the time when patients are in the physician’s office is spent explaining something. Whether it’s a product’s mode of action, a specific treatment, or something else related to the diagnosis, the HCP has to convey it to the patient.

This takes a significant amount of time for the HCP, which wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for one fact. Patients aren’t really good at remembering the information that doctors convey to them. In fact, they forget 40-80% of what the physicians tell them, immediately. Even more concerning is that the information they do remember is not correct – half of it is wrong.

Even though physicians spend lots of time informing patients about their disease, it’s just not working. There’s a multitude of factors, from overly complex medical jargon to the wrong format. By using patient education videos, physicians can save significant amounts of time they spend on each patient. In fact, they can even replay the same video from the waiting room in the office, in case the patient missed it.

Help patients remember information

Before educational videos became widely available, there were other methods for educating patients about their diagnoses. Waiting rooms were filled with posters, brochures, pamphlets, magazines, and other print material. To this day, they’re still used in some medical institutions.

However, they’re not the best solution for the patients. There is one area in particular where the video is superior – it’s easier for patients to remember information. According to research, 65% of people are visual learners and pick up data more easily from images than text.

This translates to the following – people remember about 95% of information from video, compared to just 10% from the text. By having information presented in video form, patients will remember more of it once they leave the physician’s office.

Make patients feel like they’re waiting for less time

Waiting rooms are called that for a reason. The average waiting time for an office in the US is around 19 minutes. Moreover, 97% of patients are not happy with the amount they wait every time they visit their physician.

Since overburdened physicians can’t work any quicker and the number of patients is increasing, it’s not likely that we can decrease the wait times. What we can influence is how much patients think they’re waiting.

According to research, having digital signage in the waiting room makes patients perceive that their wait is 33% shorter than it actually is. In other words, if they have a patient education video in the waiting room, a 10-minute wait will seem like it only lasted 3 minutes.

Lower stress

It’s only reasonable for patients to feel anxious at a doctor’s office. After all, their health is at stake, and they most likely don’t understand what is happening with their body.

When using patient education videos for the waiting room, you can ease patients into the process. As they’re informed about their disease before they even enter the waiting room, they can ease into the process and feel more relaxed before a physician approaches them.

They’re not just for the waiting room

Besides being more memorable, educational videos have one more significant advantage, they don’t have to stay in the waiting room. Even the best educational posters are made for the waiting room only, and once the patient leaves, the engagement stops.

With a medical educational video, physicians can send them to patients using email or whatever the patient’s preferred communication channel is. One and the same video can be reused across different touchpoints, for maximum effect.

The universal tip for creating patient education videos for the waiting room

In order for patients to understand the content of the video and remember the information, there is one key prerequisite. The script has to be broken down and presented in a language that patients can easily understand. While some medical terms are necessary, ensure that the whole of the script is easily understandable for laymen and not just medical professionals.

Creating patient education videos for the waiting room is hard

This is why you don’t have to do it on your own. There are many elements that go into creating a great patient education video, including the script, the animation, and the voiceover.

At BlueNovius, we realize the value these videos can have for patients, physicians, and pharma companies. This is why we created MedExplainer – a medical explainer video solution that allows you to explain disease, diagnosis, or treatment in just 90 seconds.

To find out how you can benefit from using a MedExplainer, book a free demo with us today.

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