Videos for outpatients
The trend among many marketing-oriented
hospitals is to offer more health care information
to outpatients and community members by establishing or enlarging onsite resource
centers, which frequently include books and audiotapes as well as videos.
These hospitals know that the potential for health video use in the
home cannot be underestimated.
In addition, wellness videos targeted to outpatients and well community members have an advantage; they're much more affordably priced than either educational videos for people with specific medical condition or health training videos. Many heal and wellness videos are available in $9.95 to $14.95 range. And with the widespread penetration of the VCR, home health video represents a vast and largely untapped market.
Despite this enormous potential, Giloth adds, videos in resource centers are more apt to be used by staff members preparing for classes or community lectures than by outpatients or community residents. This could reflect inadequate resource center planning, which in turn leads to small video collections that are often limited to the health or disease overview genre.
Karen Thomas agrees. "We have viewed and abstracted hundreds of videos on diseases like cancer and diabetes, plus women's health and aging. I am struck by the quality and quantity of those videos, which address the psychological, emotional, and even spiritual side of coping with a health problem," says Thomas, who is vice-president of collection and library development for Longe Life Communications, Inc., Deerfield, IL, a company that designs and packages resource centers.
"There are many disease prevention and wellness programs available, too. But if an individual is looking for specific information on a less sexy topic, it's very difficult to find. Resource centers that collect or produce their own videos on hard-to-find topics can become an integral focus of service delivery for an organization and set that institution apart from its competitors," Thomas adds.
(One extensive resource for videos is the Health Education Sciences Communications Association, 6105 Lindell Boulevard, St. Louis, MO 63117.)
One hospital that has distinguished itself by its health resource offerings is the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston. In addition to producing and marketing more than 20 fine videos about cancer. Anderson has established several resource centers within its system, including a patient family resource center located in the Anderson Mayfair Hotel. The hotel provides accommodations for Anderson outpatients and their families, and the resource center offers can't make money on videos for the segment of hospitals that may move patients that way."
Producers also obviously can't afford to make hospital-specific--or, in some cases, even health care specific--staff education programs.
If they want the benefits that video can provide in developing hospital staff skills in areas such as customer service, team building, marketing, sales, employee supervision, and human resources, educators must stop holding out for health care-specific programs and turn to generic packages, consultants say. They must actively facilitate discussions about how employees can transfer the skills taught in the video to their own organizations. Health care trainers are missing some of the best programs in the mistaken belief that they aren't relevant. It is the trainers' responsibility to make them relevant and keep the hospital's workforce competent and competitive.
