Picture this scenario: A husband listens attentively as a nurse explains how to empty his wife’s surgical drain in order to prepare to leave the hospital after an operation. The next day, he follows the instructions but adds an extra step, rinsing the device in the family’s bathroom sink. As a result, the woman’s incision becomes infected, requiring additional surgery.

Such well-meaning mistakes are not uncommon. “One of the reasons patients are readmitted is because they fail in self-care, such as keeping wounds clean,” says Amy Deutschendorf, vice president for care coordination for The Johns Hopkins Hospital. “There’s a lot of evidence that patient and family education makes a difference.”

Deutschendorf and Kathy Smith, vice president of marketing and communications for The Johns Hopkins Hospital, are working with colleagues across Johns Hopkins Medicine on a sweeping overhaul of patient and family education. As co-chairs of Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Patient and Family Education Steering Committee, they are leading the effort to create a vision and plan for delivering consistent, accurate health care information to patients and families.

The goal is to identify educational formats that are relevant to each stage of a patient’s treatment, such as presurgery, at the bedside in the hospital or at home postdischarge. The materials must also meet each patient’s health literacy, or ability to understand and process information about his or her condition and care.

Historically, Johns Hopkins departments developed or purchased their own patient education materials. As a result, many patients and families received jargon-laden information derived from multiple sources, which often proved repetitive, contradictory or unnecessary. The steering committee is committed to paring down such information to the essentials: care instructions, next steps and red flags, all in plain language.

Patients will receive materials tailored to their conditions and health literacy via many mediums, including hospital room televisions, tablets provided to inpatients, emails, printed documents and the MyChart patient portal of the Epic electronic medical record system.

Rollout and updates of these educational materials will be governed by a new Center for Patient and Family Education, and by the patient and family education committees at each Johns Hopkins Medicine entity. The steering committee plans to finalize a recommendation and plan by January and to begin introducing new content incrementally across the health system by the fall of 2016.