Patient Decision Aids: Communication Contexts in Health Care

Russell Kirkscey

trk82@psu.edu

https://www.russellkirkscey.com/

English/Humanities

I study how and why people make decisions about health care. My focus is on shared decision-making, which involves equal participation between the health care provider and the patient in their discussions about treatment and management options. My research emphasizes bioethics, rhetorical analysis, qualitative studies, and communication theory to complement the quantitative studies established by biomedical practitioners.

My monograph, Patient Decision Aids: Communication Contexts in Health Care, investigates the rhetorical contexts of patient decision aids in health care. The chapters include the history of the genre, the role of patient decision aids in shared decision-making, patient and provider literacies, intercultural communication, visual design, and achieving informational balance. The audiences for the book are healthcare professionals, technical communicators, and undergraduate students interested in pursuing those careers.

I am particularly interested in foregrounding the need to balance practitioners’ knowledge of evidence-based medicine with the experiential and embodied knowledge of patients. This balance is challenging on several levels, including the need to address the disparity of traditional patient and provider roles. Health information technology has begun to contribute digital tools to access and deliver information that seeks to balance the contributions of patients in particular. Patient decision-aids, for example, give background information and prompt participants to think about how treatment options interact with their values.

More information is available under the research and publications tabs on my website.