Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Vivacare, does anybody care?

Got a letter from this company about free patient handouts for website. They seem to have easy and short handouts, unlike for eg., Mayo clinic handouts which are like 10 pages.

Any experience about this butterfly?

http://www.vivacare.com/

They also give you a free website with your company name and contact information with an entire library of patient information.

It seems good.

It ok. We use it since there's no cost. You can customize the handouts if you wish. It's just found that much of our patient population, supposedly mostly of educated professionals that are internet savvy, cannot read anything we post on our website. That includes instructions on how to get lab results, office hours, scheduling appointments, etc.

Amazingly, many often then come in telling us of some incomplete information that they read on the internet, or of something 'they" said (we can't find out who "they" are)to challenge the doctor's advice. Most recent case of this last one was a women who came in for advice on travel vaccinations, then began to spout about her doctor friends at John Hopkins who told her that vaccines kill more people than they help.

Our most successful use of a vivicare handout was with a patient who was Not an educated professional,who had new onset DM2. They were given the handout to save the doctor about 20 minutes of discussion time. This patient later returned for their followup and said how informative the handout was, thanking Dr C profusely.

In my specialty the pre-packaged handouts are fairly complete and accurate as to general information. Not sure how often patients use it but I think the "Visit Our Patient Library" search box looks kinda impressive on my website home page. That counts for something.

Merck has a nice set of patient ed handouts you can also customize with your info.

http://www.merckmedicus.com/pp/us/hcp/templates/tier2/patientEdu.jsp

Greg