Dr. Andres Chang: Why Is It Important for You to Empower Patients?
Dr. Andres Chang: Why Is It Important for You to Empower Patients? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Dr. Andres Chang from Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University discusses his approach to empowering patients with CLL (chronic lymphocytic leukemia). He emphasizes the importance of focusing on patients and their families during “critical periods” of care to enhance management and support.
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Transcript:
Dr. Andres Chang:
My team spends a lot of time educating every single one of my patients about their disease, what their treatments may look like, when they may need treatments, what to expect from the disease and for each line of therapy, what kind of potential side effects. And we have this conversation, ongoing conversation throughout their disease course and their disease management. The education is provided by myself, by my nurse, by my pharmacist. We do it in person, we do it through messaging, we do it through virtual visits. And I think it’s particularly important and we pay particular emphasis during the what I call the critical periods, which is around the time that they need therapy, around the time that they start the therapy and when they progress and when they need a new therapy, for instance.
I find that this saves a lot of anxiety from our patients, improves both patient care and patient satisfaction. And at the end, it also helps a lot in saving a lot of work down the road, both by the patients, by their caregivers, as well as by our medical team because again, a well-educated patient, oftentimes they know how to address things, they know how to anticipate things, they know what important information to relay to our team. And I think that overall makes it a more effective and a more efficient patient care.
