Excellent communication is critical to helping patients understand medical information—and to achieving truly “informed” consent for invasive and noninvasive interventions. Effective patient-provider communication also results in better information retention and more reasonable expectations of treatment outcome, and it’s one hallmark of a high-quality patient experience.
In the October 5, 2016 edition of The Journal, Egekeze et al. report the results of a randomized clinical trial evaluating retention of information provided to patients newly diagnosed with knee osteoarthritis. Each of 67 participants was randomized to receive one of three informed-consent information-delivery protocols, all of which lasted 10 minutes:
- A one-on-one clinician-delivered lecture about knee arthritis, written at an eighth-grade reading level (auditory input only)
- The same lecture as above but accompanied by a silent animated knee video (auditory + visual input).
