Patient Education and Engagement

Healthcare works best when patients understand their conditions and choices and are actively engaged in their care. This page contains resources for healthcare professionals and for patients to improve written and spoken communication and increase patient participation in healthcare decisions.

For Healthcare Professionals

Engaging patients in their own healthcare and teaching them how to stay healthy and manage their health conditions relies on using health literacy strategies. Below are tools to improve health literacy skills of healthcare professionals so they can communicate clearly and provide both opportunity and encouragement to engage in healthcare decisions. 

Patient Education 

Distributing written materials is a part of health education. However, materials are frequently difficult for patients and families to understand.

Make improvements by:

• Developing a process to Assess, Select, and Create Easy-to-Understand Materials.
• Using the Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool (PEMAT) as part of that process. The PEMAT is a systematic method to evaluate and compare how easy print and audiovisual patient education materials are to understand and act on. Learn about how the PEMAT was developed and tested in this article. Listen to this podcast to hear how the PEMAT differs from other assessment tools.
• Making sure you Use Health Education Material Effectively.

Patient Engagement 

AHRQ has many patient engagement guides and tools for hospitals, primary care, and other settings to help improve interactions between providers and patients and their families. Below are health literacy tools that promote engagement.

The Toolkit for Engaging Patients to Improve Diagnostic Safety contains two strategies: Be the Expert on You and 60 Seconds to Improve Diagnostic Safety enhance communication and information sharing within the patient-provider encounter to improve diagnostic safety.

The Be Prepared To Be Engaged strategy encourages patients and their families to prepare for and become more fully engaged in their medical appointments. The goal is to help patients and families set their visit agenda and to be ready, speak up, and ask questions.

Teach-back is an evidence-based health literacy strategy to ensure that you have explained information clearly so that patients and their families understand.  

The SHARE Approach, a train-the-trainer curriculum, supports the training of healthcare professionals on how to engage patients in healthcare decision making.

AHRQ's Making Informed Consent an Informed Choice: Training Modules for Health Care Leaders and Professionals--two interactive training modules--teach strategies that healthcare organizations and care teams can use to ensure that people understand their options.

The AHRQ Health Literacy Universal Precautions Toolkit, which helps healthcare systems enhance support for patients of all health literacy levels, contains many tools that can help healthcare professionals connect with their patients. These include:

• Communicate Clearly: Tool #4
• Use the Teach-Back Method: Tool #5
• Follow Up with Patients: Tool #6
• Address Language Differences: Tool #9
• Consider Culture, Customs, and Beliefs: Tool #10
• Encourage Questions: Tool #14
• Make Action Plans: Tool #15
• Help Patients Remember How and When to Take Their Medicine: Tool #16  
• Get Patient Feedback: Tool #17

The Health Literacy and Patient and Family Engagement: Strategic Tools To Prevent CAUTI presentation describes the importance of addressing health literacy in preventing catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI) and summarizes ways to engage patients and families in CAUTI prevention.

For Patients

Asking questions and talking builds trust and leads to better results, quality, safety, and satisfaction. Here are tools that you can share with patients to improve communication. Send them to patients before visits through your patient portal, hand them out when patients check-in, and give them to patients during visits.

Patients and Clinician Videos
These videos, featuring patients and clinicians discussing the importance of asking questions at medical visits, can be shown in your waiting room.

Be More Engaged In Your Health Care
This brochure gives patients tips to use before, during, and after a medical appointment to make sure they get the best possible care.

Before a Medical Visit

Questions Are the Answer
Patients can use this list of questions to take active role in their health care.

• Do You Know The Right Questions To Ask?

Question Builder
The Question Builder helps patients create a list of questions they can take to appointments if they are getting a checkup, talking about a problem or health condition, getting a prescription, or discussing a medical test or surgery.

My Questions for This Visit
Patients use this to write down their top three questions to ask during a medical visit.

During a Medical Visit

Patient Note Sheet (PDF, 142 KB)
This sheet helps patients record important information they receive during medical appointment.

After a Medical Visit

Next Steps After Your Diagnosis
This page offers general advice for people with almost any disease or condition. And it has tips to help patients learn more about their specific problem and how it can be treated.

Your Medicine: Be Smart. Be Safe
This guide answers common questions about getting and taking medicines and has handy forms that will helps patients keep track of information about their medicines.

How To Create a My Medicines List
Step-by-step instructions to create A My Medicines List that reminds you when, how, and how much medicine to take.

After a Hospital Visit

Taking Care of Myself: A Guide for When I Leave the Hospital
Providers can give this guide to patients to help them keep track of the information they need to care for themselves when they leave the hospital.