Funding : N/A
Principal Investigator: Dr. Justin Sanders
Co-PIs: Prof. Reinhard H. Pekrun and Prof. Allyson F. Hadwin
Co-Investigators: Prof. Ericson, Prof. Blain-Moraes, Prof. Harley, Prof. Schuster
Collaborators: Dr. James Tulsky (Harvard Medical School), Dr. Robert Gramling (Univ of Vermont)
Project Description:Â Prognostic communication plays a critical role for patients with advanced cancer and their families in making treatment decisions and prioritizing how they spend their remaining time. High quality prognostic communication supports patient coping, information retention, and decision making, and requires clinicians to effectively share information in ways that balance hope and realism and respond to patient emotion. Virtual reality (VR) enables communication research in realistic settings that can be experimentally controlled. Leveraging our prior work, this proposal seeks to further develop a first-of-its-kind experimental VR platform to systematically test the effects of prognostic communication on processes and outcomes relevant to patient decision making and experience. Specifically, we aim to: (1) Characterize prognostic communication behaviors using direct observation of verbal and nonverbal clinician behaviors in simulated patient encounters. (2) Assess the emotional and cognitive outcomes of diverse prognosis communication strategies using virtual reality simulations.
