#micro explanation

[theoneofwhomisblue]

what's a,wunk

Silly animal, basically

Usually cat, but not always

[aroconnor]

Avant Garde in Digital Media: Characterizing Patient-Friendly “Micro-Explanations” of Medical Events presented at CHI 2011

What is a Micro Explanation of a Medical Event? Put simply it's good bedside manner. At different stages in our life we've all met doctors that spouted enough medical jargon at us to make a first year med student recoil and quite often this results in us trusting the doctor knows best and living in ignorance of the true meaning of the procedures we are going under.

A you can see in the above video cutting out a lot of the explanation results in the patient getting the information they need to know without any extraneous information. In the long term this results in a better experience for both the patient and the doctor by the patient not being frightened by online medical dictionaries and the doctor not being forced to answer a lot of technical questions from a worried patient. 

I choose this paper, deviating slightly from my previous focus on HCI, because the information on what procedure the patient is undergoing is parsed from consumer faced web pages. One aspect of HCI that really interests me personally is the fact I believe people are slowly being expected to know an ever growing array of technical terms outside their knowledge base and, should they not already be educated on the matter, invariably turn to a web search which either gives them too much irrelevant information or bombards them with more technical jargon to decipher.

The concept is a sound one and used by many doctors in the field however a huge amount of faith must be placed in the fact these Micro Explanations will give the patient all the relevant data. Addressing this in the paper the authors gave the 6 characteristics of a good Micro Explanation and the feedback from patients and doctors alike seemed to be good however trusting my understanding of the procedures I am going under in a hospital to a selection of algorithms is something, at least for the moment, I am unwilling to do.

Unsurprisingly this week's word cloud revolves around explanations both for patients and physicians and the authors Lauren Wilcox, Dan Morris, Desney Tan, Eric Horvitz (with the exception of Justin Gatewood) all have websites showcasing their work as well as links to the paper hosted by one of it's funding bodies Microsoft Research.