Repository of Audio Recordings from Patient Interactions Serves as SAS Research Resource
For many years, patient interactions and communications have been an area of teaching and research expertise for Social and Administrative Sciences (SAS) faculty members at Wisconsin. Building on a legacy of communication teaching and research that began with Professor Emerita Bonnie Svarstad, Betty Chewning, professor, and Henry Young, assistant professor, in the SAS Division have been making their own mark in that area of expertise. They currently teach communication concepts and skills in first-year and third-year courses and labs. Their research and research teams are continuing to advance understanding of interactions and communications in practice.
Professor Chewing, in particular, has conducted several research projects funded by Federal agencies such as AHRQ and NIA where a part of the research has involved audio recording patient and prescriber interactions. From these recordings, analysts have been able to discern whether things important to patients about their condition and medication treatments are raised and discussed during their encounters with physicians. The audio recordings that have resulted from these research projects are very rich resources in terms of the variety of questions that can be probed with regard to patient and provider communication. For example, investigations can focus on questions such as those below.
- Who initiates conversation about a topic?
- To what extent is patient involvement encouraged?
- How much jargon and technical verbiage are used—what 'level' of language and understandability is present in the conversations?
- To what extent are specific topics discussed?
Realizing the broad ranging potential in recorded interactions, Professors Chewning and Young have been working to develop a repository of patient interaction recordings, with their own and other researchers' recordings. The repository will serve as a data bank, similar to a tissue bank, to advance health communication research, education and practice. It will be available to other researchers to access and probe their own research questions following IRB and HIPAA approved protocols. Recorded and transcribed interactions are being included.
The repository is managed by Sonderegger Research Center staff and is housed in the School of Pharmacy. As it develops and grows, with contributions from other researchers willing to share their recordings collaboratively, the repository will include de-identified, human subjects approved recordings for many to potentially access and conduct their own research with the data. Colleagues and previous UW graduate students have been involved with developing and contributing to the repository. With a goal to help pharmacists engage and communicate more effectively, patient-pharmacist encounter tapes will also be collected for the repository.
It might not be Hollywood or good material for iTunes downloads, but the repository and recordings will be a unique resource for advancing patient interactions research and enhanced interactions in practice. This work has been supported by grant 1UL1RR025011 from the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) program of the National Center for Research Resources, National Institutes of Health.
