JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Musculoskeletal health literacy requires patients to understand complex treatment options, postoperative precautions, and recovery timelines, which together help set realistic expectations for recovery. However, existing patient education materials are often text-heavy, exceed recommended reading levels, and fail to depict how functional recovery progresses over time, which may be especially limiting in safety-net settings serving populations with variable health literacy. In this paper, we describe methods for designing and developing a secure, institution-restricted gait-recovery video library for orthopedic patient education. Our library was built to close that gap with short, patient-perspective recovery videos centered on one of the most meaningful outcomes of lower-extremity surgery: functional mobility. Each video was built around a standardized Timed Up and Go (TUG) assessment recorded from frontal and sagittal views, paired with relevant radiographs and visually adapted patient-reported outcome measures (PROM), to create a multimodal, visually guided recovery pathway. This publication aims to detail the process of selecting a secure hosting platform; choosing the filming setup, recovery milestones, and key visual features to capture; maintaining patient privacy and data security; executing clinic-based filming and video editing; and building a personalized interface that allows videos to be filtered by procedure type, recovery stage, and patient characteristics.