Factors Affecting Physicians’ Intentions to Communicate Personalized Prognostic Information to Cancer Patients at the End of Life

Paul K. J. Han, Nathan F. Dieckmann, Christina Holt, Caitlin Gutheil and Ellen Peters

Medical Decision Making, 2016, vol. 36, issue 6, 703-713

Abstract: Purpose. To explore the effects of personalized prognostic information on physicians’ intentions to communicate prognosis to cancer patients at the end of life, and to identify factors that moderate these effects. Methods. A factorial experiment was conducted in which 93 family medicine physicians were presented with a hypothetical vignette depicting an end-stage gastric cancer patient seeking prognostic information. Physicians’ intentions to communicate prognosis were assessed before and after provision of personalized prognostic information, while emotional distress of the patient and ambiguity (imprecision) of the prognostic estimate were varied between subjects. General linear models were used to test the effects of personalized prognostic information, patient distress, and ambiguity on prognostic communication intentions, and potential moderating effects of 1) perceived patient distress, 2) perceived credibility of prognostic models, 3) physician numeracy (objective and subjective), and 4) physician aversion to risk and ambiguity. Results. Provision of personalized prognostic information increased prognostic communication intentions ( P

Keywords: provider decision making; risk communication or risk perception; shared decision making; numeracy; physician-patient communication; affect and emotion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0272989X16638321 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:medema:v:36:y:2016:i:6:p:703-713

DOI: 10.1177/0272989X16638321

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Medical Decision Making
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().