Educate, Engage, Empower: Leveraging Technology to Promote Learning in Patients Implanted With a Left Ventricular Assist Device and Their Caregivers

摘要

The art of education is as old as civilization itself. Yet, the delivery of education has taken a dramatic turn in the last several decades. Formal teaching has moved largely from didactic approaches to flipped classrooms and hands-on experiences that leverage technology, web-based platforms, and changing theories about how the brain takes on new information. This evolution in learning has begun to make its way into medical care. Patients living with most chronic diseases are increasingly blessed with a range of advances in treatment. But this growing complexity of care options can also be a curse, as many of these therapies require a high-level of daily management that can challenge both patients and their caregivers. For patients who develop end-stage heart failure, implantation of a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) represents an extreme in this paradigm, where the device requires a major shift in lifestyle, behaviors, medications, and daily activities. Caregivers play an integral role in this process, with most LVAD programs requiring the identification of a dedicated care-giver before implantation. In many ways, LVAD technology asks patients and caregivers to function as healthcare professionals—performing controller and power source changes, doing sterile dressing changes, and even monitoring blood pressure via doppler. Further underscoring the importance of these learned skills, many of the tasks can be a matter of life or death for the patient: the leading causes of death with LVAD are stroke and infection, both of which are intimately tied to device care.1 Building the capacity of patients and their caregivers to take on these necessary duties is an important quality and safety initiative.