Final Thoughts!!!

I read articles by Dr. Enid Montague from the University of Wisconsin. Her articles were all centered around patient trust in the medical field. One focused on patient trust in technology and the other was on patient trust in the provider.

The articles had a very similar structure. They followed the basic structure for a research publication. The target audience was industrial engineers or people interested in the healthcare field. The terminology used was very technical and there were several references to other publications by Industrials Engineers.

The structure and the language the articles spoke volumes about who the intended audience would be. Although the language was technical, it would not be too difficult for a non-engineer to read and comprehend.

Whats your source?

I have more to report on patient trust. This publication focused on the patient’s source of learning about health technology. The reason for this study was to help Industrial Engineers design more effective health technology. In an effort to do this, Dr. Montague points out how important it is to understand how patients learn and what they base their decisions on.

A pool of 24 patients was studied. The three major themes that emerged were; outside of the work system vs. inside the work system, when the health information was provided, and the medium used. I was not surprised to see that there were multiple outside sources used, to better understand the technology patients were encountering during their care.

Many Americans know that there are resources such as the Internet that allows answers to any question to be at your fingertips. They want to know about the machine that they are being hooked to, even if they cannot pronounce its name.

The final results did show a correlation between the knowledge being attained from the Internet, with trust in technologies, but there was no correlation with knowledge attain from health care providers and trust. I think this can be attributed to people not have trust in the healthcare provider. They may feel as if they are not being completely honest about the technology because they just want you to consent to allowing them to proceed. Others may just feel as though the provider’s opinion is biased. Whatever the case maybe, people tend to do their own research to gather knowledge of the technology the doctors as using. This is important because once, we know how to gain the patient’s trust we can better design for them.

What does it take for me to trust the man behind he stethoscope??

The purpose of this article was to discuss the validity of an instrument for measuring patients’ trust in medical technology. This article went along with the previous article I blogged about. All of Dr. Montague’s publications that I found were about patient trust. This article once again defines trust. This time however, she breaks it down into categories. She uses the following references to define patient trust in physicians; Thom et al. (2002) define patient trust in physician as a set of beliefs or expectations that a care provider will perform in a certain way, while Pearson and Raeke (2000) define trust as an emotional characteristic, where patients have a comforting feeling of faith or dependence in a care provider’s intentions. She also mentions that Pearson and Raeke (2000) define competence, compassion, privacy, confidentiality, reliability, dependability, and communication as the most common factors of patient trust in physicians.

I found these factors to be very interesting. If you sit back and think about if you had you rate your physician what factors would you use to determine if they are a “good” doctor or not? I pretty sure many of the factors listed above would align with Dr. Montague and Pearson and Raeke’s (2000) findings.

The other category she talked about what patient trust in medical technology which is already mentioned in my last post. 

To Trust or Not to Trust that is the Question...

Next fall I plan to enroll in graduate school. I would love to attend UW-Madison. As I have been searching for research advisors, there has been one prevailing name that keeps sticking out to me, Enid Montague.  I have decided to analyze a collection of here publications, instead of on journal. I think I will being able to get more from studying her research interest and topics, since I would like to potentially work with here.

The first publication I am reading is about patients’ trust of technology in heath care. Patient’s trust has the “potential to affect the way the technology is used or not used in their care.”

After experimentation it was found that patients physicians experience technology in different ways, and therefore have different levels of trust towards it.

The publication also talked about ways to alleviate some of the patience distrust. This can be done by showing compassing for discomfort caused by the technology such as a tight blood pressure cuff, or a noisy MRI.  

When it came to patients, they develop trust in medical technology by logically combing the technology with the providers who use them. In their mind it’s a twp-part system that is evaluated together. The major components are trust in care providers, how the providers use the technology, and characteristics of the technology.  

I thought this was interesting because I would like my focus to be healthcare when I get to graduate school. Also its interesting how patience do not just assess the technology but more so how well it is used.

Simulation

I am the type of person who likes to relate the classes that I am taking to real life applications. How can I apply this after graduation? We are currently taking a simulation modeling class in which we recently had a test. I was surfing the web for IE journals an found The Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management. The article basically defined Simulation and its importance to engineering and other disciplines.

Simulation allows you to predict process performance, compare alternatives and to establish the effect of several scenarios on performance. It is also helpful when you are trying to implement a new process. The article highlighted how simulation is an up and coming research field that is gaining alot of attention.

The article was a compilation of a few research papers put together. The papers explained what each person was individually using Simulation for and the application in which they were using it. This really put the class into perspective for me.

Group Project

This group project should be interesting. Hopefully we end up with  lots of options to choose from as clients, but if not we have on right now that we can work with. I am thinking that we may need to meet soon because from talking to the client and talking to the group we may or may not all be on the same page. The good news is that both parties are excited.

This project reminds me of my first IE class, Introduction to System Design. We basically had to do the same thing except the client's need could be anything, not just a commissioned document. I think this may help my group members who are also IEs tremendously throughout this process.

WikiWorld

The video was pretty interesting. I think the best part about Wikipedia is that you CAN see information about such a large array of topics, and you decide what is important. I would have to say that I thought both men made valid points.

I was reader though a magazine and saw a page that posed the question "will the internet kill magazines?"
The response was "instant coffee kill coffee?" I thought this was very interesting in wake of recently watching that video that compared "real" encyclopedias such as Britannica to Wikipedia. The magazine says that readership has increased over the past five year and the 18- 34 segment continues to grow. I believe this statement because I normally don't read this magazine, but I picked it up this time and really enjoyed it. I am considering picking it up again. I also have subscriptions to a few other magazines.

The article ended by saying that magazines remain the #1 medium for driving purchase consideration and intent. As long as this statement is true, I do not think advancements in the internet or wikiWorld will be replacing magazines anytime soon.

The article can be found in Essence magazine.

Instructions over and done...Roger that

The instructions are now submitted and turned in. This was a pretty good first project for this class. I thought the peer evaluations were very helpful, because they gave insightful types from a broad audience of potential viewers. Some class mates were completely oblivious about the topics of group members topics, while others were very knowledgeable about the topics.

The knowledgeable class mates were able to critic each other based on what they knew to be facts and what they thought were important. The not-so-knowledgeable class mates were the perfect test group. Their level of confusion could always be used to indicate how clear of unclear the instructions were. 

My Absolute Point of View

I thought the experiment with the poem we were talking about in class was very interesting. It just goes to show, that with the right amount of minds thinking, even the most random group of words make sense. It makes me think of paradigms. My psychology teacher put  five one six three two on the board and asked the class to recognize the pattern. It took a while for someone to get it. Everyone was trying to figure out  a mathematical algorithm or pattern that would fit. We were all thinking on the wrong paradigm. We should have noticed that the words were spelled out for a reason, they were in alphabetical order. It had nothing to do with math or numbers, we were missing the point that at the end of the day, they were merely words.

I try to think of myself as a very liberal person. I do not really believe in too many absolutes. I think that everything is a matter of perception or opinion. There is always another way of looking at the same thing. After all the only reason we believe the things we know are "facts" is because someone society believes to me smart, told us so.

In the time of Galileo people just KNEW the world was flat and the solar system revolved around the Earth, that has obviously been proven wrong. I wonder what we "know" now, will be proved wrong in the next 100 years.

Don't bore me w/ your introduction please...

I know I already blogged about instructions, but I have a few concerns that I wanted to discuss.

1. I never really noticed an introduction to the instructions. I do not know if it is just something I deemed as unimportant so I skipped it, or what. Because I never notice them it was hard for me to see their importance. After reading some of the examples in class however, I can see how they come into play. I think the class examples were entirely too long. This brings me to my second concern.

2. Now that I have agreed that introductions do have some merit, I do not understand why they have to be so lengthy. Maybe for some items where the introduction is used to give warning statements and pertinent background information, I can understand. My instructions is about how to tighten you glute muscles, I just do not feel like a lengthy introduction is necessary. I have a brief introduction prepared, but I hope it is enough.

I guess my concern is that I will appear slack, but in actuality, I feel as though my intro should be clear and concise due to the nature of my instructions and my audience. When people are trying to get workout tips, they do not want to read a long drawn out essay, they want to see pictures and get the step by step instructions right to the point.

We butchered those examples in class, and I do not want to be a hypocrite, so I will keep mine to the point, until other wise instructed.

Instructions are Tricky Creatures

During my sophomore year when I took my first IE class, there is a class called IE 210. This is a Human Factors class. During the lab we studied the importance of good DETAILED instructions. We watched the youtube videos about making a peanut butter sandwich based on instructions given by someone else. It was extremely difficult because so many times people do not give detailed directions that can be taken literally word for word. We leave stuff out mainly because we assume its "common sense". Good directions are written so that they can not be confused or misinterpreted. I am interested to see how we are going to study this topic in this Technical Writing class. I am just interested to see the approach Dr. Barnet is going to take. Instructions have to be tailored to the audience and they have to consider the fact that the user may be completely ignorant to how to perform the task. The only assumption that can safely be made is that the user has no idea how to complete the task.

Rhetoric

I really enjoyed the clips from "Thank You for Smoking". This was not my first time seeing this movie and if you have never seen it, it is definitely worth the hour and change it takes to watch it. This movie was a prime example of rhetoric. 

When I think of rhetoric I think of someone using/manipulating words to get the audience on their side. Sometimes the speaker's goal is not to persuade the audience to see it this way, but just to discredit the opposition. A goal is sometimes to distract from the obviously negative things they are supporting such as smoking.