JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Good clinician-patient communication is essential to provide quality health care and key to patient-centered care. However, individuals and organizations seeking to improve in this area face significant challenges. A major barrier is the absence of an efficient system for assessing clinicians’ communication skills and providing meaningful, individual-level feedback.

Objective:

The purpose of this paper is to describe the design and creation of the Video-Based Communication Assessment (VCA), an innovative, flexible system for assessing and ultimately enhancing clinicians’ communication skills.

Methods:

We began by developing the VCA concept. Specifically, we determined that it should (1) be convenient and efficient, accessible via computer, tablet, or smartphone; (2) be case-based, using video patient vignettes to which users respond as if speaking to the patient in the vignette; (3) be flexible, allowing content to be tailored to the purpose of the assessment; (4) allow incorporation of the patient’s voice by crowdsourcing ratings from analog patients; (5) provide robust feedback including ratings, links to highly rated responses as examples, and learning points; and (6) ultimately have strong psychometric properties. We collected feedback on the concept and then proceeded to create the system.

Results:

We identified several important research questions, which will be answered in subsequent studies.

Conclusions:

The VCA is a flexible, innovative system for assessing clinician-patient communication. It enables efficient sampling of clinicians’ communication skills, supports crowdsourced ratings of these spoken samples using analog patients, and offers multifaceted feedback reports.