Association Between Communication Quality During ICU family Meetings and Patient Health Outcomes

I will serve as co-Principal Investigator on this project. I am a health communication scientist with more than 15 years’ experience in designing and evaluating the quality of messages in health conversations. In particular, I have been a co-investigator on several NIH-funded, PCORI-funded, and RWJF-funded studies totaling approximately $17 million. These projects have involved evaluating clinical communication for dimensions of quality in various clinical contexts requiring difficult or sensitive conversations between physicians, patients and their families, including end-of-life discussions, transitional care discussions, cost-of-care conversations, and cancer screening discussions. My area of methodological expertise is analysis of communication quality, and I am co-author of Communication Quality Analysis (CQA), the measure of interest in the current project. For this project, I will lead the execution of CQA (including training coders and managing the coding process); share responsibilities for data analysis; co-present results at professional conference; co-lead manuscript writing and publication; and support the development and dissemination of the results.