As an important social determinant of health, health literacy has garnered greater attention in recent years. In fact, a National Assessment of Adult Literacy report revealed that 88% of American adults lack the health literacy skills required to manage the many demands of the US healthcare system, while another survey from Copatient found that 72% of people have received a medical bill they don’t understand. A key reason for this deficit is a lack of patient- friendly terminology.
Fortunately, organizations that use IMO Core Periop now have access to patient-friendly surgery and procedure terminology. By mapping standardized clinical terms to their patient-friendly equivalents behind the scenes, IMO Core Periop eliminates the need to create thousands of additional versions of your schedulable procedures.
Based on client feedback, IMO has enhanced IMO Core Periop to include patient-friendly terminology. This new content includes the top 3,000 most widely used surgical procedure terms across our client base, as well as all AORN Syntegrity content within the Epic® foundation.
IMO Core Periop’s patient-friendly surgical procedure descriptions:
- Appear alongside standardized clinical terms, aliases, codes, inpatient only identifiers, and more- in the same file used for the OR scheduling module
- Seamlessly pass through to patient interfaces like check-in kiosks and patient portals (online and mobile apps)
The following are examples of technical procedure terms and their more accessible ‘translations’ now available in IMO Core Periop.
| Clinical terms | Patient-friendly descriptions |
|---|---|
| REPOSITIONING, IOL | Operation to reposition intraocular lens (artificial lens in eye) | ORIF, FRACTURE, NOSE | Open operation to set broken nose by inserting hardware (pin, screw, rod, plate, etc.) | CYSTOSCOPY, FLEXIBLE | Procedure to examine inside bladder using endoscope (small video camera used to see inside body) |
| URETEROLITHOTOMY | Operation to remove stone from uterer (tube that carries urine from kidney to bladder) |
To learn more about patient-friendly terminology and why it should be on your organization’s radar, check out our insight brief, Searching for the right words: Exploring the need for patient-friendly terminology.
