What should patients learn? Co-designing patient education to improve medication safety, professional-patient communication, and partnership (10 September 2025)

Summary

Adverse drug events are a major focus of patient safety research, but work is often limited to healthcare professionals’ actions and inpatient populations. The patient work system provides a framework to understand the work done by patients and other nonprofessionals. The authors aimed to improve medication safety through the development of short educational videos designed to facilitate professional-patient partnership and shared decision-making by addressing the knowledge gaps and information asymmetry that serve as barriers to productive primary care encounters.

The authors concluded that information asymmetry provides a framework to understand why some patients defer decision-making to professionals while also showing the greatest interest in the partnership module. It also highlights why it is important for professionals to tell patients about their desire for patient ownership of care—engaged patients provide better information to professionals, who might otherwise work with incomplete records. To improve medication safety, patient education efforts should include a focus on how patients can partner with HCPs and be mindful of the work system barriers that patients will encounter while performing the educational work. Successful efforts stand to improve patient outcomes by reducing information asymmetry and enabling shared decision-making.