You’ve just received a serious medical diagnosis. Your doctor advises surgery. You want to know more about your condition: Is it progressive? How fast and in what manner? Is surgery your only choice? Is there an interim treatment? How long before you need to make a decision?
You have a million questions, you want all the facts.
How would you feel if your doctor told you that a video can help fill you in?
That’s the premise of new computer-based, informed-consent programs like Emmi Solutions, which are currently used by hundreds of hospitals across the country.
The programs e-mail patients interactive videos pertinent to their diagnoses and the surgeries they face. The videos provide step-by-step explanations of the procedures, and outline risks and potential benefits. The videos can even answer some of the questions patients might have.
The stated goal of informed-consent videos is to help patients better understand the consent they’re giving, while freeing doctors to concentrate on physcial doctoring.
Patients can watch the videos in the privacy and comfort of their homes when they feel ready to absorb the pertinent facts. They can pause the videos, rewind them, watch them as many times as they like.
This new approach to patient education and consent is being presented as an alignment with the Obama administration’s push for electronic storage of medical records. But the Obama advocacy intends for e-records to streamline communication and prevent medical mistakes; and video-enabled informed consent is, according to the Associated Press, largely meant to protect hospitals and doctors from malpractice liability:
Computer-based informed consent programs provide an electronic record that gives hospitals extra ammunition against malpractice lawsuits.
When patients watch Emmi programs, stopping and starting them to review information, they create an electronic trail. Hospitals have used that data in court to argue that patients were informed about specific risks because they watched portions of the program where risks were detailed.
Learn about your care and making healthy choices at InformedMedicalDecisions.org.
UPDATE: When first published, this post mistakenly characterized iMedConsent, a company that has developed an application to enhance doctor-patient interaction, as a provider of automated informed-consent programs. We regret the error.
Photo courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives/Creative Commons via flickr.
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