Courses Details

PUBHLTH335: Patient-provider Interaction

• Undergraduate level
• Residential
• Fall term(s) for residential students;
• 3 credit hour(s) for residential students;
• Instructor(s): Staff (Residential);
• Prerequisites: None
• Advisory Prerequisites: PUBHLTH 200
• Description: This course examines the role of patient-provider interaction in shaping health care and health systems change. The foundation of the course is transdisciplinary research – blending insights from anthropology, communication studies, education, public health, psychology, and sociology – that uses audio, video, and text-based records of real-world patient-provider interactions to describe and intervene in healthcare practice. We will explore how patients, providers, and teams interact via verbal and nonverbal conduct to coordinate routine activities, such as making decisions, assessing risks, weighing treatment options, and discussing end-of-life care, and their impact on healthcare quality and outcomes. Through a complex systems perspective, we will also consider how small changes or issues in interactions can make big differences at multiple levels of scale. We will consider how history, power, authority, culture, identity, language, and worldviews about health and well-being, linking micro, meso, and macro-level dynamics, shape and are shaped by interactions at the point of care. Throughout the course, we will weigh the possibilities and limitations of transforming health care through patient-provider interaction. This class is ideal for students with a range of interests: careers in health care, research in clinical settings, improving your interactions with healthcare providers, or a general curiosity about communication in real-world settings.
• Learning Objectives: 1. Demonstrate an understanding of how historical, social, cultural, political, and healthcare contexts shape relationships and dynamics between patients and providers. 2. Describe how patient-provider interaction influences healthcare quality, outcomes, and systems. 3. Explain common practices and dilemmas that arise in patient-provider interaction. 4. Critically evaluate empirical research on patient-provider interaction. 5. Observe and qualitatively analyze patterns in verbal and nonverbal conduct in patient-provider interactions. 6. Propose ways to translate evidence from research real-world patient-provider interactions into practice.