Hospital Story: Taking Patient Education Online—It Just Makes Sense!

Written by Susan DiBattista | Aug 4, 2015 3:30:00 PM

In this era of patient-centered care, it’s important that hospitals always think about the patient first. That includes how and when they prefer to learn about their health and in-hospital care.

At Women & Infants Hospital in Rhode Island, part of the Care New England health system, we took this patient-centered approach when we recently launched an online birthing class called the “Understanding Birth eClass.”

A patient-first approach, combined with the right tools to promote and deliver the right message at the right time, helped us connect the dots when communicating with, engaging and educating patients online.

eLearning lets us deliver education the way our patients want it—online. Once thought of as a “disruptive technology,” elearning is now the learning style of choice for many Americans.

Online learning is an area where healthcare is learning from the success of other industries. The global eLearning industry is expected to reach $107 billion this year and 77% of U.S. companies offer elearning as part of professional development.

Our online birth class gives patients the education we need them to have about giving birth at our hospital at a time and in a place that is most convenient for them. Expectant families can even learn after hours, which works especially well for working families. No longer are they—or we—bound by when our staff is available to teach classes.

The Challenge: Promoting for Success

We had a clear stake in the game. eLearning helps us work within our budget and maximizes our limited resources and staff time.

We needed to figure out how to change our processes and promote elearning comfortably for patients. We used the power of UbiCare’s SmarteXp campaigns to reach a targeted population of pregnant women in the way they want us to communicate with them (digitally) and the results were truly impressive.

We sent the campaign encouraging enrollment in the “Understanding Birth” eclass to women at specific points in their pregnancies. An outstanding 68% of recipients opened the message, showing me that our expectant moms trust and value the weekly health information they’re receiving from our hospital (through the same UbiCare patient education system).

Within half an hour, I had received my first phone call asking to register for the class! With one day, we had a 68% open rate. It’s a wonderful feeling to see such immediate results and clear, measurable impact from our work!

Sending a digital campaign to promote the class also reduced the resources we put toward our birthing classes as we created the message once and it is continually delivered automatically to patients at the right time in their pregnancies.

In short, the switch to elearning, plus using UbiCare SmarteXp campaigns to reach the right audience at the right time, allowed our hospital to save time and resources, educate more patients in the way they wanted it and build our hospital’s business and reputation at the same time!

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