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Care Plans are a good starting point for designing patient facing communications. These plans include a series of general stages that align with a patient’s typical health journey.
In the Colorectal Cancer example noted above, the plan outlines seven clear steps or stages to the journey:
Prevention and early detection
Presentation, initial investigations and referral
Diagnosis, staging and treatment planning
Treatment
Care after initial treatment and recovery
Managing recurrent, residual or metastatic disease
End-of-life care
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For each of the stages, the Optimal Care Plan includes (1) patient symptoms, (2) proposed clinical investigations and (3) suggested patient communications. The suggested communications detailed here can be used to establish a patient facing communications plan.
Establishing different communication types
Generally, this information includes the timing of the communication and may also include a suggestion of the form of communications (phone call, message, document, video etc) that would be appropriate.
In addition to suggested communications collateral contained in Care Plans, many hospitals, clinicians and patient support groups (e.g cancer council) have existing fact sheets and leaflets they regularly provide the patient.
Both the care plan and existing collateral can be included in the communication plan.
Creating a procedure-based communications plan
The communications plan is designed to provide an overview of how the patient is communicated with during their health journey. The plan should indicate what communications should be delivered, to who, and when.
A simple spreadsheet, example below, can be used to organise content and to illustrate when it should be delivered to the patient.
Stage/ | Stage 1: Diagnosis | Stage 2: Pre-surgery | Stage 3: Surgery | Stage 4: Recovery | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Message |
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Document |
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Video |
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Form |
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In addition to stage-based positioning of content, it is also important to document any timing relating to delivery of the communications. Timing can be based on
Entering a stage
Time after entering a stage
Timing triggered via an Index Event (e.g admission date, surgery date)
Time after and Index Event
Establishing a clear communication plan is a critical to ensure the ability to accurately create a procedure pathway in the ForPatientApp solution.