Patient Education and Engagement Through Multimedia: Prospective Pilot Study on Health Literacy in Patients with Cerebral Aneurysms.

INTRODUCTION: Improving the comprehension and communication of patient education materials may augment patient participation in shared clinical decision making. Inadequate healthcare-oriented educational resources for patients with a newly diagnosed complex disease, such as a cerebral aneurysm, may lead to an insufficient understanding of their particular ailment. As such, we hypothesized that a PowerPoint-style educational intervention with grade-conscious (i.e. 6(th) grade level) written material accompanied by visual graphics would help improve patient health literacy and satisfaction. METHODS: A randomized prospective pilot study was conducted during a one-year period in 2018. Pre-clinic encounter knowledge assessment surveys were administered to 52 brain aneurysm patients (newly diagnosed or follow-up) presenting for their neurosurgery outpatient clinic visit. Patients were assigned to one of two cohorts whereby 26 patients were given the educational intervention and 26 patients were not using quasi-random method consisting of alternating the assigned group with each successive patient. At the conclusion of their clinic encounter, all patients received a post-clinic encounter knowledge assessment and satisfaction survey. Differences in covariates such as gender distribution, age, and family history of aneurysms were analyzed between the control and intervention groups. RESULTS: The overall study cohort had a high baseline knowledge about cerebral aneurysms with an average pre-clinic encounter score of on the seven-question survey (Figure 1). The educational intervention resulted in upward trend in patient knowledge scores (Figure 2). No statistical difference was detected in patient satisfaction scores between the intervention and control groups. However, the majority of the patients receiving the educational intervention reported that the educational material was easy to understand (95.7%), helpful (86.9%), and relevant (87%) to their clinic visit. CONCLUSION: Overall, in this prospective study, the use of a multimedia educational intervention resulted in an upward trend in knowledge gain without a statistically significant difference in patient satisfaction scores, compared to control patients. In order to better measure the effectiveness of multimedia-based patient education interventions, future studies should account for baseline education level, preexisting educational resources available to study patients, socioeconomic factors, and emotional state.