Patient Education Leaflets, Meaningful Use and translations in multiple languages

My colleague, Matt Bennardo, wrote a wonderful blog posting about the potential upcoming changes in stage two Meaningful Use guidelines as it relates to Patient Education. This could be a very big deal.

Patient education will become more and more important over time, because there is a strong belief that better patient outcomes will result if patients know more about their condition, treatment program, and drug regimen. On the drug side, this could mean dose administration regimen, dosage precautions, drug interactions, drug-allergy interactions, adverse drug events and more.

What EMR vendors (and institutions) need to start thinking about today, are the implications that requirements to supply Patient Education Leaflets, likely will not just mean English.

In his posting, Matt, states: "The workgroups are additionally talking about better and more relevant patient education. One point of discussion has been providing the materials in "common primary languages" for every metropolitan statistical area. This would require providers to have patient education available in any language that is spoken by 5% of the population they serve, or at least 1000 people in the same population -- whichever is lower. This is a big deal, and not every information vendor is in a position to deliver on this!

He goes on to say:

Lexicomp can help bridge the gap
Luckily, some vendors are. Lexicomp has long had patient education materials in many languages. At last count, they could provide up to 19 different languages commonly spoken in the United States and Canada. This is just one example of how a forward-thinking drug information vendor was able to anticipate and meet advanced requirements before they were even formulated. So when evaluating vendor partnerships for your EMR or HIS system, it's not enough to find one who can check off boxes. Instead, you need to find a vendor with the same commitment to improving patient care that ONC and CMS are seeking."

Please take note now, early in the integration of your drug module into your EMR system.