Penn State Hershey Med Center Chooses Krames for On-demand Patient Info

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 05/11/09

Penn State Hershey Milton S. Hershey Medical Center has adopted the Krames On-Demand Web-based service to provide patient education. The Center said its multi-language offerings drove the decision.

"Although we are in rural Pennsylvania, our patient-base is quite diverse speaking many languages," explained Agnes Marie Cummings, department education council chair at Penn State Hershey. "The fact that Krames On-Demand had education content in English, Spanish, Russian, and Vietnamese was very important to us."

Krames On-Demand is a library of 3,000 health information sheets spanning 38 medical specialty areas, plus 2,000 medication information sheets. All the content is available in English and Spanish, with subsets of content available in Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Hmong, Korean, Farsi, Armenian, and Tagalog. The sheets, which are printed as they're needed from a Web site, provide text to explain what's involved in a procedure or how to manage health conditions and include artwork to help patients visualize conditions and procedures.

The Center also sought a resource that was continually updated and evidence-based and would complement its internally developed Interdisciplinary Education Records (IER) system. "Krames On-Demand is an excellent resource that complements the IERs we've developed on multiple disease processes," said Cummings. "And through Krames' editing tool, called Custom Content Builder, we can add our own internally developed education to the Krames On-Demand library. This really improves workflow because now our team has one comprehensive resource for all our education needs at our fingertips."

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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