News

Ohio hospital will use kiosk to educate diabetes patients

December 10, 2002

KENNEDY TOWNSHIP, Pa. --Ohio Valley General Hospital will soon educate its new diabetes patients using a touchscreen kiosk, said Sandra Carpenter, the hospital's diabetes educator.

The kiosk is being tested by the hospital's education staff now and will be used by patients early next year.

The small 119-bed community hospital is located about 15 minutes from downtown Pittsburgh.

"The idea for our kiosk is to use it in patients' rooms," Carpenter said. "It's a resource of some of the basics for diabetes care. It covers nutrition, medicines, exercise and foot care."

Patients will navigate through eight topical modules. Each module is designed to last 15 to 20 minutes.

Maria Guzzo of the Cincinnati Business Courier recently mentioned the project in a story about high-tech training in the paper's Dec. 6 issue.

Flipside Media Inc. of Shaler Township, Pa., designed the kiosk, according to Guzzo's story.

"The hospital has an older population, some of whom are hard of hearing with limited typing skills, so we knew it had to be a touchscreen solution," Brad Ummer, president of Flipside Media, said in the article.

The article indicated that kiosk use, among other new media, is becoming more popular for use in business. Some of the outlined uses were for employee training, customer education or sales and marketing.

"When it comes to learning retention, the lowest is if you're told something," Ummer said according to the Cincinnati Business Courier. "It gets higher if you're told and read something, and even higher if you add audio to it. The highest is when you're engaged and interactive with it - where there are simple questions on what you just learned."