PatientVOICE: Development of a Preparatory, Pre-Chemotherapy Online Communication Tool for Older Patients With Cancer.

Background: Good communication around cancer treatment is essential in helping patients cope with their disease and related care, especially when this information is tailored to one's needs. Despite its importance, communication is often complex, in particular in older patients (aged 65 years or older). In addition to the age-related deterioration in information and memory processing older patients experience, communication is also complicated by their required yet often unmet role of being an active, participatory patient.

Specifying the effects of physician's communication on patients' outcomes: A randomised controlled trial.

Objective: To experimentally test the effects of physician's affect-oriented communication and inducing expectations on outcomes in patients with menstrual pain.

Methods: Using a 2×2 RCT design, four videotaped simulated medical consultations were used, depicting a physician and a patient with menstrual pain. In the videos, two elements of physician's communication were manipulated: (1) affect-oriented communication (positive: warm, emphatic; versus negative: cold, formal), and (2) outcome expectation induction (positive versus uncertain).

Healthcare providers' accuracy in assessing patients' pain: A systematic review.

Objective: Healthcare providers satisfy an important role in providing appropriate care in the prevention and management of acute and chronic pain, highlighting the importance of providers' abilities to accurately assess patients' pain. We systematically reviewed the literature on healthcare providers' pain assessment accuracy.

Methods: A systematic literature search was conducted in PubMed and PsycINFO to identify studies addressing providers' pain assessment accuracy, or studies that compared patients' self-report of pain with providers' assessment of pain.

User preferences and usability of iVitality: optimizing an innovative online research platform for home-based health monitoring.

Background: The iVitality online research platform has been developed to gain insight into the relationship between early risk factors (ie, poorly controlled hypertension, physical or mental inactivity) and onset and possibly prevention of dementia. iVitality consists of a website, a smartphone application, and sensors that can monitor these indicators at home. Before iVitality can be implemented, it should fit the needs and preferences of users, ie, offspring of patients with dementia.

Reducing patients' anxiety and uncertainty, and improving recall in bad news consultations.

Objective: Patients' recall of provided information during bad news consultations is poor. According to the attentional narrowing hypothesis, the emotional arousal caused by the bad news might be responsible for this hampered information processing. Because affective communication has proven to be effective in tempering patients' emotional reactions, the current study used an experimental design to explore whether physician's affective communication in bad news consultations decreases patients' anxiety and uncertainty and improves information recall.

The power of clinicians' affective communication: how reassurance about non-abandonment can reduce patients' physiological arousal and increase information recall in bad news consultations. An experimental study using analogue patients.

Objective: The diagnosis of incurable cancer may evoke physiological arousal in patients. Physiological arousal can negatively impact patients' recall of information provided in the medical consultation. We aim to investigate whether clinicians' affective communication during a bad news consultation will decrease patients' physiological arousal and will improve recall.