Improving Medical Communication—Reply

Abstract

COMMENT & RESPONSEIn Reply Drs Anderson and Ledford bring to our attention meaningful classifications for medical communication. It is indeed helpful to categorize medical communication into interpersonal, organizational, and mass media since each type has different needs and stipulations.Anderson and Ledford rightly point out that medical communication needs to be patient-centered and bidirectional. We acknowledge that the title of the figure "Information Flow in Medical Communication" in our article 1 implies a model with a unidirectional flow of information from clinician to patient. This was, however, not our intent. We completely agree that communication strategies need to be personalized and targeted to the individual patient, as we outline in the section of our article titled "Social Context: Belief System of the Patient." The objective of our article was to present a broad framework based on strategies that have shown success in message persuasion and behavior change in other fields such as public health, social science, and marketing, rather than to present a model for medical communication. It is imperative to incorporate patient-centered communication within these broad strategies. The next article in the series, "Delivering Effective Messages in the Patient-Clinician Encounter" by Drs Cappella and Street provides evidence-based approaches that emphasize the patient-centered and interactional nature of patientclinician communication. 2 We also agree with Anderson and Ledford that communication scientists should advise clinicians and collaborate with them to develop effective communication strategies. Additionally, we welcome diverse points of view and approaches in this developing field and invite communication scientists with the authors' expertise to submit articles to the Communicating Medicine series. 3