Barriers to successful communication between healthcare providers and patients

Abstract

Effective communication between healthcare providers and patients is crucial for optimal health outcomes yet barriers exist that may decrease successful information transfer. In this talk, we provide an overview of our research program that brings together two central challenges for provider-patient communication: the acoustic environment and the linguistic characteristics of the speech. We describe a corpus of medically-related sentences, varying in their frequency and familiarity characteristics. We evaluated the intelligibility of these sentences in quiet, speech-shaped noise, and hospital noise for both young and older adults. Results demonstrated that combining low familiarity words with any noise source causes steep word recognition declines for both listener groups, and that older, but not young, adults had more word recognition difficulties in hospital noise compared to speech-shaped noise. In the future work, we are extending these studies to investigate comprehension and recall of orally presented health information for different populations (e.g., nonnative speakers) under a range of conditions (e.g., audio-visual, speakers wearing masks). These investigations integrate research on hospital soundscapes with foundational concepts from the speech perception literature to address a crucial real-world context. [Supported by IU Institute for Advanced Study and James S. McDonnell Foundation.]