Generating personalised explanations for patients: research overview

The importance of patient health education is widely acknowledged. Potential benefits include: increased patient compliance; enabling patients with chronic problems to better manage their conditions; enabling informed shared decision making between patient and health professional; reducing anxiety in patients, and so on. While such education should (arguably) be primarily the responsibility of the health professionals, verbal information can usefully be complemented with leaflets, videos, and even online computer based information systems. However, preliminary studies suggest that these materials might be more effective if they contained information targeted at the individual (L. Osman et al., 1994). Indeed, substantial resources have gone into the development of 'personalised' interactive videos for eg., prostate cancer. Information can be tailored to the individual in many ways. For traditional patient education, factors influencing how and what is presented include the patient's existing knowledge, motivation, their problems and treatments, their beliefs about health, and whether they are active 'information seekers'. At least some of this information may be easily obtained either from the medical record, or via a fairly short computer based interview. We are therefore exploring how information about the individual patient may be used to produce more relevant and targeted information resources, both written and online.