December 19, 2018 – Blood Clot Education

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Anchor lead: Education helps make sure people receive medicines to prevent blood clots, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Blood clot prevention is extremely important in hospitalized persons, but more than 10% of the time doses of medicines to prevent them are missed. Now a new education effort developed by Elliott Haut, a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues, is helping everyone understand the importance of prevention.

Haut: We asked patients and their families what did they want to learn and got the information, and then we created educational materials focused on the patient. It comes with a two page handout, it’s written in relatively simple language so everybody can understand it. Part two is a video. It has physicians and nurses and it has six patients telling their own story, and part three is a one on one conversation with a nurse educator about blood clot formation.  :28

Haut says the education team is alerted when the electronic health record detects that a dose of the medicine has been missed so intervention is targeted. He says rates of missed doses have declined by more than half since the program has been in place, and the materials are available online. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.