Our sixth instructional exercise for helping physicians build their contextualization skills has been posted on the Resources page.

And with the help of The Book Stall, we’ll be signing books and speaking at a luncheon at the Union League Club of Chicago on June 17. For ticket information, visit the EventBrite page.

We are pleased to embark on the next phase of our work inviting patients to collect data during their medical visits for the purpose of improving quality of care. With a recently approved $1.1M grant from the Department of Veterans Affairs, Health Services Research & Development, we will expand our research in Chicago to include Veterans care facilities in Madison, Milwaukee, Cleveland and Los Angeles. The regional Veterans Integrated Services Network (VISN 12) will provide $130-$150/year in additional funds over three years to support the project.

Entitled “Evaluating Use of Patient-Collected Audio Recorded Encounters for Provider Audit Feedback to Reduce Contextual Errors,” the study will evaluate the efficacy of a quality improvement initiative we developed in which patients audio record their visits, and the data is then employed to identify and implement opportunities to improve contextualization of care.  The study has two aims: to identify and address obstacles to implementation of a patient-collected audio audit and feedback quality improvement process, optimizing the extent to which the process is perceived as safe, not burdensome and valuable by clinicians and patients; and to compare the effectiveness of two methods of providing clinicians with feedback on their performance to determine the intensity of the intervention necessary to improve clinician performance at contextualizing care and health care outcomes, and to lower costs.