BACKGROUND/RATIONALE:
Patient-physician communication is vital to all aspects of clinical care. Specifically, misunderstandings in patient-physician communication can be catastrophic. In 2005, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare (JCAHO) identified communication problems as the number one cause of all medical errors in the United States health care system. Poor communication creates tremendous costs - emotionally, psychologically, and financially. Good communication is associated with effective pain control, improved patient emotional and psychological well-being, increased patient adherence to treatment recommendations, and enhanced patient satisfaction.

Effective communication impacts many of the VA priority areas, such as obesity, palliative care, and cancer. The need to improve physician-patient communication is essential for providing effective veteran health care. Yet, before one can improve communication, and design interventions to assist in improving communication, better measures of communication are needed. The aim of this CDA was to measure patient-centered communication and its effects on patients

OBJECTIVE(S):
My proposed CDA-2 training program was designed to develop the methodology skills I needed to design reliable, valid measures that focus on specific communication skills relating to veteran care. My work is particularly invested in developing innovative, measurable communication methodologies that can be used to assess the quality of provider-patient communication and its relationship to veteran health related quality of life. Although most CDA applications are disease-focused, my CDA application focused on developing innovative methodologies to analyze communication. Effective communication is a skill that transcends specific illnesses and contexts. Health communication is inherent within all stages of a person's development, from birth to death, and occurs in a variety of settings such as the home, clinic, hospital, and workplace and among a variety of stakeholders including patients, providers, family members, friends, insurers, and employers. Developing assessment tools that are applicable to a number of settings and for a number of illnesses will help in designing communication interventions that can teach specific tools and techniques for providers in multiple settings and with a variety of individuals.

METHODS:
My CDA encompassed both qualitative and quantitative methods. Qualitatively using thematic analysis to identify communication themes and then quantiatively using those theme to measure the quality of the communicaiton

FINDINGS/RESULTS:
Not yet available.

IMPACT:
If we are to improve communication in the VA, we need tools that can reliably measure these changes in the quality of care. The development of evaluation tools for communication is essential for determining which communication behaviors are related to the improvement of patient health related quality of life (HRQoL). By determining the behaviors that are related to patient HRQoL, researchers can design and test effective communication interventions. Currently, we are lagging behind in our ability to assess these interventions and need to develop methods qualitatively and quantitatively that can assess the actual communication change as a result of these interventions. The need to focus on specific communication behaviors that relate to specific health related quality of life outcomes are essential for determining the impact of these interventions on veteran care.

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External Links for this Project

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PUBLICATIONS:

None at this time.

DRA: Health Systems Science
DRE: Prevention, Prognosis
Keywords: none
MeSH Terms: none