Patient Education in Nuclear Medicine

• Illness is serious stuff, often seen as a betrayal of body.
• The situation is worsened by request for tests whose nature and need are a mystery to the patient.
• No where is this confusion more acute than in less well known areas such as Nuclear Medicine.

Faced with a Nuclear Medicine study, most patients want to know:

• Why am I having this test?
• What is involved?
• How long will it take?
• How can I prepare for the study, e.g., can I take my medications?
• Will other tests be necessary?

Then, of course, there are questions like:

• What is Nuclear Medicine?
• Am I going to "glow in the dark?"
• Isn't radioactivity dangerous?
• Can I be around other people?

For these reasons, I decided to provide and information system for patients and their loved ones. The application

• can also be run by a nurse or other health professional.
• is not a substitute for a caring physician.
• might serve as (part of) "informed consent."
• uses Helm (Eagle Tree Software) for its interface.

From the Main Selection Area a topic can be selected.

Suppose our hypothetical patient wants to know more about Bone Scans. He/she would merely select this option, and then be presented with a list of commonly asked questions:

Surely, they would like to know why they are having this scan:

• Did you notice the "Print" button at the top of the page?
• By pressing this button, the patient can receive a print out on bone scans to take home and read!

They probably also want to know how long the study will take

and if any additional exams will be needed.

• They might then want to compare a normal bone scan
• with one that is abnormal
• This is one more spot where a health professional could really play an important role!

While looking at images,

• They can even hear what makes a normal bone scan [490K Sound File (WAV)].
• Different from an abnormal one [736K Sound File (WAV)].

Amazingly enough, this Patient Education in Nuclear Medicine can be run on the World Wide Web.

• Each page can be screen captured by Art Department Professional (ADPro), cropped, and stored as a 16 color GIF format image.
• The coordinates of the buttons are determined using the MouseCoords program (Jonathan Potter).
• These values are stored as a map file in the public_html/Maps directory in the Unix shell.
• The imagemap function which is in the cgi-bin directory of httpd is used to read the coordinates of a mouseclick and go wherever you have specified in your map file.
• Each screen would of course have its own map file, because each button (except for directionals) on each pagedoes something different.

So, let's see how simple interactive World Wide Web education could take place.

• BEFORE you re-display the Main Menu (actually only the first page), I must tell you that I have only made the Bone Scan button (upper left) active.
• Now go ahead --

• I think you'll agree that it's all rather remarkable.

What of the future?

• I do intend to update the Patient Education program itself with several of the newer studies.
• As for putting the guts of the application on the Internet, I am undecided because of the amount of work involved versus the number of patients, patient families, and health care professionals who would use it.

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