Educating the Underserved in Your Waiting Room

The health centers, clinics and practices around the country that help the underserved do a great job of helping as many people as they can with limited budgets. They see many more patients than the normal practice during the course of the day and unfortunately because of a variety of factors including education, income, and access to help, their patients tend to need to be seen more often than other patients and place a high cost burden on the center. Their patients tend to have more chronic diseases, more hospital readmission issues, and poor medication management.

One inexpensive way to help them is to look at your waiting area and turn it into a learning center. The first step is to contact Halo Health or a similar company and get a customizable, ad-free HDTV-based patient education system for your waiting area. These systems help educate your patients on the basics of good nutrition, exercise, hygiene, and diet as well as introduce the need for preventative health screenings, the recognition of at risk behaviors, and disease prevention.

All for the cost of cable and with no outside influences that really affect the underserved population like prescription drugs, unhealthy foods, chain restaurants, worker’s comp lawyers, class action and medical malpractice law suits, and unhealthy TV programming including talk shows, soap operas, game shows, and cooking shows.

The information gets tailored to your demographics including making the information multi-lingual, focusing on specific disease states that are more prevalent in your region, and keeping the information topical for your climate. The content is easy to understand and easy for the viewer to put into action.

If only one hospital readmission a year is affected positively by the system, it pays for itself 100 times over. While patients may tell you they would rather watch TV, would you rather them be healthier?

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