Investigating the Impact of Video Inpatient Medication Education on Patient Experience and Readmission Rate: A Retrospective observational cohort study with group comparison (Preprint)

<sec> <title>BACKGROUND</title> Effective communication about medications in acute healthcare settings plays a key role in long-term management and outcomes. Despite the importance of pharmacist-led interventions in improving patient understanding and medication adherence, face-to-face interventions are often costly, requiring significant amounts of clinical pharmacists’ time, and cannot easily be scaled. </sec> <sec> <title>OBJECTIVE</title> In this study, we assessed the efficacy of a scalable, video-based, text-initiated program where short medication videos were texted to inpatients in a large quaternary medical system. </sec> <sec> <title>METHODS</title> A retrospective observational cohort comparison was conducted to analyze the outcomes of all patients who watched one or more of the medication education videos texted to them during and immediately following their inpatient visit between January 2024 and December 2024 and compared their outcomes with patients who did not watch the videos texted to them during the same time and on the same hospital units. “Watching the video” was operationalized as watching at least 50% of the video. Our primary outcome measures were patient experience scores and readmissions. </sec> <sec> <title>RESULTS</title> A total of 18,391 patients received 232,957 medication videos that were sent from January 1st to December 31st, 2024, across all 7 hospitals. Our findings suggest that those who watched at least 50% of the videos had significantly higher HCAHPS scores and significantly lower readmission when all domains were considered, as well as when only the communication about medications domain was considered, compared to those who did not watch at all. </sec> <sec> <title>CONCLUSIONS</title> While we documented variability related to age, gender, race, ethnicity, and admission type, more work is warranted to explore specific behaviors or patient characteristics that makes such interventions more effective. </sec>