Patient-Provider Communication - Making Clinicians’ Invisible Work Visible

Patients’ understanding of their clinical situation has been shown to positively impact patient care. However, without a clinician’s verbal explanation, patients often remain uninformed about their care team, treatment procedure, and laboratory results conducted during their stay in the hospital. Unfortunately, under the pressure of limited time and resource, such in-person interactions are not always available for all patients. Based on the field research in an inpatient care setting that identified numerous information needs and barriers of hospitalized patients, I present an experimental prototype of an interaction tool to facilitate patient-provider communication during the hospital stay.

Ji Youn Shin is a 2017 MDes in Integrative Design candidate.