Abstract

Patients with chronic conditions like heart failure are the most likely to be re-hospitalized. One step towards avoiding re-hospitalization is to devise strategies for motivating patients to take care of their own health. In this paper, we perform a quantitative analysis of patients’ narratives of their experience with heart failure and explore the different topics that patients talk about. We compare two different groups of patients- those unable to take charge of their illness, and those who make efforts to improve their health. We will use the findings from our analysis to refine and personalize the summaries of hospitalizations that our system automatically generates.

Highlights

  • Patients with heart failure are responsible for around 95% of their chronic illness care and their daily decisions have a huge impact on their quality of life (Funnell, 2000)

  • We found that in spite of using fewer medical terms, patients with high PAM levels speak a higher proportion of unique medical terms

  • We presented a quantitative study on the interviews with heart failure patients we collected

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Summary

Introduction

Patients with heart failure are responsible for around 95% of their chronic illness care and their daily decisions have a huge impact on their quality of life (Funnell, 2000). We are engaged in a large, long-term project that aims to improve patient discharge instructions with a personalized and comprehensible summary of their hospital stay that is informed by the perspectives of the three main stake-holders: doctors, nurses, and patients. The current version of our system uses the following personalization features: A) Participation in self-care: The Patient Activation Measure (PAM) (Hibbard et al, 2004) quantifies how motivated patients are in taking care of their health. Our analysis of the patients’ use of pronouns suggests that patients with low PAM levels tend to selffocus, which is associated with negative effects and low self-confidence (Duval and Wicklund, 1972; Pyszczynski and Greenberg, 1987). We discuss themes that emerge from those conversations, with the goal of highlighting aspects that hold significance in the patients’ lives: for example, patients with high PAM focus more on activities they are interested in, patients with low PAM on their own feelings (confirming the finding about pronouns just discussed)

Related Work
Interview Collection
Distinguishing Low from High PAM Patients
Usage of medical terms
Reference to self
Sentiment of the patient
Topics Discussed by Patients and Their Relation to PAM Level
Conclusion and Future Work
Findings
A Supplemental Material
Full Text
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