Duke Heart Transplant Patient Education Library
Initial Direction for Discussion
The Opportunity
The Duke Heart Transplant team currently provides substantial education directly through its clinical staff before and after transplantation. Much of this information is necessarily repeated across patients and caregivers.
A modular patient education library could preserve the expertise and personal involvement of Duke's clinical team while giving patients and caregivers a reliable way to review essential information whenever they need it.
The objective is not to replace coordinator education.
The objective is to make that education easier to deliver, easier to repeat, and easier for patients and caregivers to retain.
Proposed Structure
The initial library could be organized around two major phases of the patient journey.
Preparing for Heart Transplant
Potential educational areas may include:
Understanding the evaluation process
Understanding the transplant team
Transplant candidacy
The heart transplant waitlist
Donor matching
What to do while waiting
Receiving the transplant call
Preparing for hospitalization and surgery
Understanding the transplant procedure
Expectations for patients and caregivers
Living After Heart Transplant
Potential educational areas may include:
Preparing for hospital discharge
Medications and immunosuppression
Recognizing signs of rejection
Recognizing infection
When to contact the transplant team
Follow up appointments and testing
Recovery and rehabilitation
Nutrition and activity
Caregiver responsibilities
Returning to everyday life
Long term transplant care
Format
Rather than a single long educational program, information would be divided into concise individual modules.
This would allow Duke to provide the appropriate education at the appropriate stage of care while also maintaining a library patients and caregivers can revisit later.
Depending on the subject, modules could combine:
Clinical staff explanation
Patient friendly graphics
2D animation
3D anatomical animation
Procedure visualization
Existing Duke materials
Patient or caregiver perspectives where appropriate
Delivery
Content would be designed to remain flexible enough for Duke to distribute through its preferred systems.
Potential delivery may include:
MyChart
Epic patient journeys
Inpatient on demand viewing
Direct links provided by coordinators
Pre visit education
Post discharge review
Caregiver and family education
The final delivery workflow should be determined by Duke based on existing clinical and technical systems.
Clinical Collaboration
The clinical team's time should be protected as much as possible.
A streamlined development model could use:
One pre transplant coordinator point person
One post transplant coordinator point person
Heart Transplant program leadership
Additional clinical experts only when their specific expertise is required
DWALT Media would then handle the majority of organization, interviewing, scripting, production, animation, editing, revisions, and final media preparation.
First Step
Before defining the final scope, DWALT Media would work with the pre and post transplant representatives to answer three questions:
What information does the team explain repeatedly?
What information do patients and caregivers have the most difficulty understanding or remembering?
What information would benefit most from visual explanation?
Those answers would determine the initial module list, production requirements, priorities, and budget.
Goal
Create a heart transplant education resource that is clinically accurate, easy to understand, easy to access, easy to revisit, and genuinely useful to both Duke's patients and the clinical teams caring for them.