The Next Frontier in Communication and the ECLIPPSE Study: Bridging the Linguistic Divide in Secure Messaging

abstract: Health systems are heavily promoting patient portals. However, limited health literacy (HL) can restrict online communication via secure messaging (SM) because patients’ literacy skills must be sufficient to convey and comprehend content while clinicians must encourage and elicit communication from patients and match patients’ literacy level. This paper describes the Employing Computational Linguistics to Improve Patient-Provider Secure Email (ECLIPPSE) study, an interdisciplinary effort bringing together scientists in communication, computational linguistics, and health services to employ computational linguistic methods to (1) create a novel Linguistic Complexity Profile (LCP) to characterize communications of patients and clinicians and demonstrate its validity and (2) examine whether providers accommodate communication needs of patients with limited HL by tailoring their SM responses. We will study >5 million SMs generated by >150,000 ethnically diverse type 2 diabetes patients and >9000 clinicians from two settings: an integrated delivery system and a public (safety net) system. Finally, we will then create an LCP-based automated aid that delivers real-time feedback to clinicians to reduce the linguistic complexity of their SMs. This research will support health systems’ journeys to become health literate healthcare organizations and reduce HL-related disparities in diabetes care.The article is published at https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jdr/2017/1348242

The Next Frontier in Communication and the ECLIPPSE Study: Bridging the Linguistic Divide in Secure Messaging

Health systems are heavily promoting patient portals. However, limited health literacy (HL) can restrict online communication via secure messaging (SM) because patients’ literacy skills must be sufficient to convey and comprehend content while clinicians must encourage and elicit communication from patients and match patients’ literacy level. This paper describes the Employing Computational Linguistics to Improve Patient-Provider Secure Email (ECLIPPSE) study, an interdisciplinary effort bringing together scientists in communication, computational linguistics, and health services to employ computational linguistic methods to (1) create a novel Linguistic Complexity Profile (LCP) to characterize communications of patients and clinicians and demonstrate its validity and (2) examine whether providers accommodate communication needs of patients with limited HL by tailoring their SM responses. We will study >5 million SMs generated by >150,000 ethnically diverse type 2 diabetes patients and >9000 clinicians from two settings: an integrated delivery system and a public (safety net) system. Finally, we will then create an LCP-based automated aid that delivers real-time feedback to clinicians to reduce the linguistic complexity of their SMs. This research will support health systems’ journeys to become health literate healthcare organizations and reduce HL-related disparities in diabetes care

Determining Intent: A Quantitative and Qualitative Linguistic Analysis of Holographic and Professional Wills

My dissertation focuses on the language of wills. More specifically, I am interested in how the language of holographic wills (i.e., handwritten wills) differs from the language of professional wills.My research question is Do linguistic differences between professional wills and holographic wills have the potential to affect the interpretation of the wills, subsequently influencing the outcome of the probate process? In order to address this question, I conduct a quantitative and qualitative contrastive corpus analysis of holographic and professionally-prepared wills. My hypothesis is that the discourse of holographic wills will tend to be more narrative-like, reflecting personal experiences and emotions. By contrast, the language of professional wills is more formal and rule-driven than the language of holographic wills. By using computational analysis tools such as the Gramulator, my dissertation identifies specific language differencesbetween these two text types that support my hypothesis. These differences are assessed through a variety of statistical methods. Additionally, I perform a qualitative assessment of three case studies on individual wills using discourse analysis approaches to provide insight into why and how the meaning of the text may be determined. Although both types of discourse have their differences, their main goal is the same: to convey the testator\u27s intent. The purpose of my dissertation is to facilitate this goal by demonstrating to the legal community how non-professionals write their wills so that when a controversy over a holographic will arises, the legal community can apply the methods and techniques presented here and determine the testator\u27s intent, since by law, this is what is required