Effectively Communicating Medical Risks

"We propose to design and develop an effective medical risk communication tool, called CONSULT. The design will be based on an evaluation of the empirical research and studies that address risk perception factors and methods for improving riskcommunication. These include addressing issues in understanding probabilities, as well as emotional, social, media, and trust factors. A CONSULT authoring tool will be developed so that medical professionals and researchers can create consultations fornew medical issues, as well as update information for existing issues. A key capability of the tool is the ability to build the risk probability models that are graphically displayed and interactive. These are the models that relate the client'spersonal data and profile (medical history, lifestyle choices) to the various risk outcomes (e.g., probability of side effects, or of recurrence of disease). The authoring tool will be designed so that there will be no requirement for programminglanguages or scripting. Clients can interact with CONSULT to play out `what-if' scenarios and view alternative consequences of choices. The types of information, multimedia, and presentation style will be customized to the individual based on theirpersonal data and concerns profile. CONSULT is expected to provide benefits for clients, medical professionals, and researchers. Increased compliance with medical policies results in fewer health problem