How can communication between patients and healthcare providers be improved?
Patient Communication Preferences While in the Hospital Setting.
When I first began my PhD program at the Information School at the University of Washington, I reviewed data collected as part of the Patients as Safeguards multi-year research project. One set of interviews with hospitalized patients struck me when a patient referred to themselves as an “eavesdropper.” I then used a qualitative, inductive approach to review all of the patient interview transcripts from that particular study and discovered that this theme of “eavesdropping” occurred multiple times, although only one participant explicitly used the term “eavesdropping.”
While the term “eavesdropping” can be quite controversial and provocative when used to describe events in the healthcare setting, I wanted to stay true to the words used by the research participants.
Other work with this team included looking at different forms of possible communication systems for patients while in the hospital. One study involved design sessions with children who had been hospitalized, siblings of children who had been hospitalized, parents of hospitalized children, and pediatric hospital clinicians.
Publications
Erin Beneteau, Shefali Haldar, Sonali R. Mishra, and Wanda Pratt. “Eavesdropping”: An Information Source for Inpatients. Computers, Informatics, Nursing: CIN, December 2020.
Erin Beneteau, Sonali R Mishra, Shefali Haldar, Calvin Apodaca, Ari Pollack, and Wanda Pratt. 2020. Where Are My Parents?: Information Needs of Hospitalized Children. Late-Breaking Work in Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
How Can Telehealth Best Serve People Who Do NOT Use Their Voice to Communicate?
In these two studies, conducted in conjunction with Microsoft Research, we explored telehealth in the context of patients who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC).
We wanted to understand how people who use AAC are currently accessing telehealth- and what the benefits and barriers of telehealth are for people who use AAC. We did not want to just look at one side of the story though, so we interviewed both people who use AAC and healthcare providers who work with people who use AAC.
We also wanted to understand how telehealth technologies could be developed to better accommodate people who use AAC and who may also have physical disabilities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we partnered with children, engaging in co-design online in one-on-one settings, to design telehealth solutions.
Both of these studies revealed positive aspects to telehealth and the potential for future telehealth designs. Despite being conducted during the pandemic, I found both of these studies to be very positive experiences, with the results providing hope for the future of telehealth.
Publications
Erin Beneteau, Ann Paradiso, Wanda Pratt. Telehealth experiences of providers and patients who use augmentative and alternative communication. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2021
Link to the JAMIA abstract is here.
Erin Beneteau, Ann Paradiso, Wanda Pratt. Children’s Designs for the Future of Telehealth. American Medical Informatics Association’s Annual Symposium. 2021.
Surfacing Hidden Bias in Healthcare.
I worked for two years as a member of the UnBIASED research team. This team includes researchers from the University of Washington and University of California San Diego, committed to understanding, detecting, and surfacing hidden biases which occur during patient-clinician interactions.
More information regarding the UnBIASED team can be found on our website: unbiased.health