Thomas Goetz, the executive editor of WIRED magazine, gave a talk at the 2010 TedMed Conference on the importance of information presentation in health care. In this 19-minute talk, he covers many interesting points.
In the first half, he talks about how to motivate patients to take control of and change their behaviors. In the second half, he talks about how medical information should be presented not with the physician in mind but rather the patient.
Motivating patients to change behavior:
This part of the talk in many ways could just as easily have been pulled from a talk on Medical Education. How do we motivate students to learn? How do we get patients to stop smoking, brush their teeth, or change their diet? It's not just about instilling fear but rather giving them a sense of "high efficacy," or belief that they can indeed accomplish the task at hand.
- Patient action plans and education curricula should be personalized. In education, this means creating a Personal Learning Environment for each learner so that s/he sets their own learning goals and manages both the content and process of learning.
- Changing and motivating behavior requires active engagement by the patient/learner and can be characterized by this cycle:
Information presentation should target the patient:
Lab results and medical information should be geared not just to physicians but also to patients. The speaker gives some compelling evidence showing that medical information presentation can draw patients into the medical decision making process of their own health and incentivizing them to change.