OBJECTIVES: Patient Education has become one of the important standards for many accreditation bodies. This paper describes how the HFMEA can be applied in improving the patient education at an outpatient department of a tertiary care hospital in India METHODS: A multidisciplinary team trained on HFMEA methodology analyzed various processes involved in patient education at outpatient department. The team identified potential failure modes in each process, assigned hazard scoring for each of them, followed it with the various causes leading to these failure modes and actions or outcome measures to overcome them. RESULTS: We identified 8 processes and 32 failure modes with average hazard scoring of 6. The high risk potential failure is identified as, “healthcare worker doesn’t identify the need for patient education in specific cases” and the least potential failure is identified as, “absence of translator for language barrier”. The actions or outcome measures and the persons responsible for implementing them are detailed for further improvement. CONCLUSIONS: Patient Safety and care reliability issues are a major concern in healthcare. This study suggests that tools such as HFMEA can enable a detailed analysis of the patient education process and guiding improvement efforts