What patients need to know: communicating without diagnosing
There are many challenges in the healthcare sector. One would think that they only evolve around the lack of structured medical data (data quality), the diverse nature of this data (structure and syntax), the sensitive nature of health care decisions (and data), as well as the fact that health care data sits in separate silos (medical versus lifestyle). Yet, from our experience, an equally important challenge exists and revolves around the right way of communicating medical findings with the patient or user; people like you and me.
The task is not easy, far from that. This last step in the journey is crucial to properly complete our vision at Medicus AI and ensure the best user experience. In the end, the information we deliver to the user is the outcome of the long process of tedious work that happened in the background.
So in setting out to build a product that users would truly benefit from and engage with, we started by asking the right questions: Who is our target audience? What is their state of mind when browsing through the app? How do we deliver a clear, concise, and simple message that would help and empower, rather than alarm?
Ultimately it comes down to communicating and explaining often complicated health-related information, while taking into consideration our audience’s physical and mental state, without ever giving an explicit diagnosis. In addition, we also need to inform them when it’s necessary for them to consult with a healthcare provider. And all these questions should be answered while respecting a solid scientific and medical background that would help the patient or user establish trust and confidence in our content.
What is our aim?
Our ultimate goal is to create meaningful insights for patients and users, empowering them to understand their medical and health info. Meaningful insights encompass a large array of outputs ranging from the explanation of a test value personalized to an individual’s profile, to providing actionable insights based on habits that can help the user enhance or maintain a healthy status.
Why is it important?
Understanding is a powerful tool to solve any problem. Understanding the needs of users is crucial to providing the right information. Understanding the meaning of a medical or a health-related value allows the user to be in charge of their health and opens the door for change.
Empowering the user and placing them at the center of any health-related product is the key component to provide high-quality healthcare.
How do we achieve it?
In order to provide users with trustworthy explanations and insights, we created our own guidelines and defined the rules of communicating health-related information with the user.
When describing a medical test result, we employ a “clinical reading or a clinical finding”. A clinical reading is the literal explanation of the medical test result value compared to the reference value. In order to differentiate a clinical reading from disease diagnosis, we rely on the international classification of diseases, such as WHO/ICD-10 database (The International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM)) and SNOMED CT (the Standardized Nomenclature of Medicine — Clinical Terms).
The purpose and usage of these databases are different. The ICD reference guide discusses the structure and taxonomy of the ICD classification system. The SNOMED terminology uses the words disorder and findings and defines these according to several reliable characteristics of each sub-category.
After carefully considering their approaches, we decided to follow some basic rules when generating our content and communicating a health-related value explanation, in order to avoid communicating a diagnosis to the user. These include conducting proper research of each term used in our clinical readings and only employing those that are not mentioned explicitly as a disease in the medical databases.
The terms we employ are considered as descriptive clinical findings and do not imply a diagnosis. Hence, the use of suggestive rather than affirmative verbs when describing a result. When needed, preceding descriptive verbs by modal verbs, such as “could”, “may” and “might”, to express a probability or a possibility rather than a certainty (may be referred to). And finally, employing terms like “such as” and “among others” when listing a series of possible medical causes since our aim is to give examples and not a diagnosis.
Today at Medicus, we are on a continuous journey to refine the way we create content that is both accurate yet non-conclusive, staying away from implying diagnoses while empowering the user with as much clarity about their health data as we can, putting them in the driver’s seat when it comes to taking the next steps to improve and maintain their health.
