Hi, everyone.
Thanks so much for tuning in.
My name is Shefali Haldar.
And on behalf of my co-authors, I'm
excited to share our study published at CSCW this year.
I'll start by saying that the hospital is
a very stressful and scary place for many people,
now more than ever.
There's a lot of uncertainty around the patient's care plan,
a lot of confusing medical jargon,
unfamiliar providers, high risk of experiencing medical errors.
All of these challenges really build upon each other
and create a very complex health care setting for patients
to navigate.
One way to help patients overcome
these challenges is to offer them the support of their peers
in this setting.
We know from a big body of CSCW literature
that there are a lot of benefits to patients engaging
with their peers, such as increased
self-efficacy, knowledge, and empowerment in their care.
But a lot of technologies that are designed
to facilitate this peer support are
designed for chronic conditions or for use outside
of a clinical setting.
So we still have a lot of questions
about how the support could be enabled in the hospital.
So our research team was actually very interested
in how to translate peer support technologies into the hospital
setting.
So we designed and built this Patient Advice System or PAS
for short, which is, essentially,
a Reddit-inspired online health community for patients
to connect with each other during their hospital
stay to share advice, upvote, and comment on this advice.
And we had two main research questions about the Patient
Advice System.
First was, how do patients actually
use the system to connect with peers during their hospital
stay?
And second, what our patient experiences,
or what are the benefits and challenges of actually using
a peer support technology in a clinical setting
like the hospital?
So in order to answer these questions,
we followed this methods procedure.
We first did a bedside interview with patients
and started them on the onboarding process, got
them set up with the system.
We then had them use the patient advice system
for their hospital stay.
And once they returned home, we did a brief phone interview
to reflect on their experience using the technology
and interacting with their peers.
And we repeated this process at two hospital sites--
a childrens' hospital and an adult hospital, and we
recruited a total of 30 participants
for this research study.
Our study produced a lot of data and a lot of findings.
We cover these in a lot of detail in our CSCW paper.
But we talk about a number of different areas,
for example, the overall usage patterns of different features
of the Patient Advice System at each hospital site.
We discuss how patient peers interacted with each other
through the Patient Advice System.
We share what types of advice were exchanged
between patient peers.
Here's a quote from a patient, for example,
who's looking for social support in order
to pass the time during his hospital stay.
And we also discuss, again, the benefits and challenges
of using a peer support technology in the hospital.
So here's a quote from a patient about discussing
the trade-off between managing illness versus engaging
with peers.
We also do have a related publication that specifically
goes into how the Patient Advice System actually
impacted the quality and safety of our patients' hospital
stays, too.
But for today, I just want to focus on the key takeaways
for the CSCW audience.
The first is that our community of participants in the hospital
shared these characteristics of having
a shared experience of a physical place
but also high transience in terms of a lot of turnover
between community members.
And so in our paper, we discuss the implications
of these characteristics for online communities,
how to design for these kinds of characteristics,
and how we consider these in understanding how participants
engage with each other and interact with each other.
We also discuss a number of design implications
for future peer support technologies in the hospital,
such as integrating local expertise
and institution-specific information,
aligning the peer engagement features and opportunities
with how patients are feeling in terms of their illness
management.
And we also explore how to reduce
the cognitive and physical burdens of patients
and optimizing the connectedness that they
need to feel with their peers in the hospital.
Ultimately, the goal of these design implications
is to create tools that allow patients
to experience the benefits of peer support,
overcome the challenges in their hospital care,
and engage in their health care in a new way
in this clinical setting.
And with that, I'll wrap up, and happy to take any questions
or talk about the study further.
Thanks so much for listening.