Making Surgical Pathology and Radiology Reports More Patient-Friendly

To restate the obvious, surgical pathology reports have a new audience -- patients. Some of them are accessing their reports via patient portals (see, for example:Patients Often Lukewarm about Patient Portals; Problems with Training?;Could Apple Be Trying to Develop a"Patient Portal" for the iPhone?). Traditionally, pathologists have dictated these reports with the understanding that they were communicating primarily with the physicians who submitted the tissue for diagnosis. An important question these days is whether the language of these reports needs to be altered in any way now that patients are reading them. A recent article discussed a radiologist-developed"platform" that tweaks radiology reports so that they can be better understood by patients (see:New platform creates patient-friendly radiology reports). Below is an excerpt from it:Patients may soon have a much easier time understanding the details of their own radiology reports, thanks to a platform presented by Seong Oh, MD....The platform, called Patient-Oriented ReporTER (PORTER), was designed as a response to the increasing prevalence of online patient portals and various online medical resources. Patients are being asked to access their own information from home, Oh and his colleagues recognized, but radiology reports are still being written as if they ’ll only ever be read by someone with a medical background....PORTER takes the radiologist ’s findings and helps translate it so t...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Medical Consumerism Medical Education Pathology Informatics Radiology Surgical Pathology Source Type: blogs