Communicating Medical Risk
connecting artists and doctors to improve communication in medicine
In Spring 2012, I participated in Communicating Medical Risk, an experimental joint Brown RISD course aimed at bringing together designers, artists, and scientists together to create tools to improve communication in medicine. My team - Joanna Jacobs (Brown '14) and Mariah LaMontagne (RISD Illustration '13) - focused on rethinking the information given to breast cancer patients. Our project was guided by the questions: how can we make conversations between doctors and patients more personalized, help patients remember information, and facilitate continuity of care as patients visit multiple doctors?
We developed a communication template to help doctors deliver information about a diagnosis to a patient in a simple, nonthreatening way. It has blank spaces for the doctor to fill in personalized information and serve as documentation of a conversation that the patient can refer to later. The illustration aids the doctor in drawing to explain details about the cancer and treatment. Additionally, the single booklet contains sections for different kinds of doctors, aimed at making conversations about a patient's care more unified.
To get feedback on our communication template, we talked with oncologists at Rhode Island Hospital who helped guide our design. This winter, our project will be prototyped by doctors in Providence at Merriam Hospital and Rhode Island Hospital. We hope to use the feedback to continue developing our guide for further implementation.
