The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute has awarded $646,770 over two years to Ira Wilson and Bart Laws in Brown’s Department of Health Policy and Practice to develop tools that will help researchers analyze the often imperfect dialogue between doctors and their patients. Wilson, a physician who chairs the department, says decisions about care are often driven by physicians rather than made collaboratively with patients to account for their preferences and personal situations. “The long-term goal of this research is to develop methods that contribute to better patient decision-making, more engagement with care and better health outcomes,” Wilson said in the pilot project abstract. “The goal of this project is to develop and test methods to isolate and describe in detail interaction processes concerning treatment decision-making and other disease management problems such as medication adherence.” Wilson and Laws will use the money to record and systematically analyze 200 audio recordings of visits between doctors and patients with heart failure and chronic renal disease and to conduct post-visit surveys.Read more