Latent Semantic Analysis: A new measure of patient-physician communication.

Rationale: Patient-physician communication plays an essential role in a variety of patient outcomes; however, it is often difficult to operationalize positive patient-physician communication objectively, and the existing evaluation tools are generally time-consuming.

Objective: This study proposes semantic similarity of the patient's and physician's language in a medical interaction as a measure of patient-physician communication. Latent semantic analysis (LSA), a mathematical method for modeling semantic meaning, was employed to assess similarity in language during clinical interactions between physicians and patients.