Choosing Wisely in Bite-Sized Pieces
For the past several years, the Minnesota Health Action Group (The Action Group) has been sharing Choosing Wisely materials with its members — nearly 50 diverse organizations throughout the state that purchase health care plans to cover tens of thousands of employees. Members include large Fortune 500 companies; members of the public sector; and smaller organizations.
During regular conversations with members, Deb Krause, Vice President of The Action Group, learned that campaign messages were not filtering down to employees. When she scheduled follow-up conversations, she found out that most benefits departments were small and had limited bandwidth.
“It was a matter of taking the time to listen to them to hear about the barriers they were facing,” Krause said. “They thought the information we provided about Choosing Wisely was great but a little overwhelming. They were looking for bite-sized information and we discussed ideas about that.”
Krause used these suggestions to create a mini-Choosing Wisely communications campaign featuring 12 short articles that members could easily use for their monthly employee newsletters, Intranet sites or benefits Web sites. Each of the monthly articles is based on patient-friendly resources created by Consumer Reports and specialty societies participating in Choosing Wisely, and cover topics such as antibiotics, low-back pain, and allergy testing.
In December 2016, The Action Group hosted a webinar with presentations from Consumer Reports for members focusing on ways they could use the articles to educate employees about Choosing Wisely throughout 2017. A special “Employer Toolkit” is available online for all employers who are interested in Choosing Wisely.
