What impact can patient education have on healthcare outcomes? Dr. Shaakir Hasan from Beth Israel Lahey Health shares his methodology of treating patients like first-year medical students, explaining conditions from pathophysiology to prognosis, and reveals how this educational approach builds trust, comfort, and engagement.
Transcript:
Dr. Shaakir Hasan:
Education, I cannot stress that enough. Whenever a patient walks in, I treat them as if they’re like a first year medical student, basically. And I’ll say, you know, what do you understand of your condition? Do you want to go over it? And I just kind of from the pathophysiology to the current condition to treatment options, to what to look forward to as far as far as prognosis, et cetera, I was very surprised to find how engaged patients would be in learning about that.
Now not every single patient really wants to know everything, wants to be treated like a student, but I was surprised that the proportion of patients that are truly engaged, that truly do want to learn and as a result of it, become empowered and a lot more comfortable with whatever decision they make a lot more comfortable with me, being around me, just knowing that they have a lot more trust in me because I took the time for them to understand what’s going on. And so that’s definitely how I would empower my patients.
