Developing an educational video on bariatric surgery for obese patients in the primary care setting

Danny Mou, MD; Claire DeVries, MD

Residents in General Surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital 

PGY 3

March 26, 2019 

Briefly, we hope to develop an educational video obese patients to give them a concise overview of various surgical weight loss options. We originally envisioned that this video would be shown to patients in the waiting rooms of the Jen Center PCP clinic. However, after extensive discussions with the Jen Center PCP leadership and an interview campaign with 8 PCPs, we realized that there will be operational obstacles. Obstacles include how to discreetly provide these iPad videos to only obese patients, how to manage the iPads handling/charging/maintenance, and how to minimize disruptive video noise in the waiting room.

The PCP interview campaign was helpful for us to realize that PCPs would prefer to use this video as a bridge to the bariatric surgery info session. Most PCPs prefer having the flexibility to direct their patients to this video, either in the form of a card with link and QR code, or simply a dot phrase to pull the link into the After Visit Summary printout. From this feedback, we have decided to provide the video on the Center for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery (CMBS) website, and provide Jen Center PCPs with links to the video on business cards.

Sample screen shot of animated bariatric surgery video (source ASMBS)

As for the development of the video, in discussion with Dr. Ali Tavakkoli and Dr. Matthew Hutter at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), we will use the American Society of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery (ASMBS) animated videos (Figure 1). A number of these videos will be edited, rearranged, and addended with BWH-specific information on attending a bariatric surgery info-session.

As for next steps, we hope to publish this data so we are applying for an IRB. Primary endpoints will be a pre/post survey before and after the video for patients, PCP feedback on experience with the video, CMBS info session attendance volume, and CMBS referral volume.

From our work so far, we developed an appreciation of the challenges of identifying ways to launch an initiative with minimal impact to existing workflow. We also experienced first-hand how difficult it can be to gather stakeholder agreement over what content is important to include in the video.