WED-107 - Including Patients in the Development of Research Surveys & Interview Guides on the Diagnostic Process

Brief Abstract Summary: Learn how to engage patients, clinicians, and other stakeholders who coproduce diagnostic safety in clinical research. We will discuss how we involved patients with limited English proficiency and those who are elderly and have chronic illnesses, as well as other stakeholders in the initial stages of research, particularly survey and interview tool development. You’ll learn how to identify and involve patients or stakeholders in the development, implementation and evaluation of your public health data collection tools, including quantitative and qualitative tools.

Detailed abstract description: Involving stakeholders, including patients, in the research process is a key step to project planning, implementation and evaluation. Early involvement improves research quality and relevance, patient safety, patient engagement, and can empower other patients to participate. Through this session attendees will learn about our research exploring how patients and clinicians coproduce diagnostic safety together through dynamic teaming at known risk points in the diagnostic process. By the end of this session, attendees will explore how they can engage stakeholders in research.
In our study, we are looking beyond how teamwork is needed for safe and timely diagnoses to how the newer concept called “dynamic teaming” improves the diagnostic process. Teaming involves shifting team membership, tasks, and risks, that are common in the ambulatory diagnostic process, rather than the stable “teamwork” with fixed teams and tasks. Patients, providers, care partners, interpreters and other non-clinical stakeholders take part in “teaming” behaviors that can coproduce safety during the diagnostic process. Valuable input from these stakeholders may be missing from many diagnostic processes. This research approach expands the diagnostic team to include these under-recognized team members to further understand their contributions. We then plan to develop tools to support these teaming behaviors during the diagnostic process. Furthermore, this research is equity focused, engaging patients with complex diagnostic processes, including older adults with chronic diseases and those who have limited English proficiency.
An initial step of this research engaged patients and other stakeholders in developing surveys and interview guides for patients, care partners, providers and interpreters to better understand their teaming roles in the diagnostic process. A carefully selected advisory board with expertise in patient safety, qualitative research, organizational psychology, and patient engagement contributed to the development of our data collection tools. Then a plain language specialist ensured the tools were in language suitable for target reading level. Patients also reviewed interview guides and surveys and provide their unique insights. We used their collective insights, including feedback on the "teaming" behaviors items, in the data collection materials. Involving stakeholders in a collaborative process to develop data collection tools was essential to the quality of our research.
In this session, attendees will learn how to identify, engage, and work together with patients and stakeholders during project development and implementation; discover how we engaged with patients and providers in the development and testing of survey and interview instruments prior to implementation; and have a chance to brainstorm specific examples on how they would work with patients, community members or other stakeholders during their projects' design and implementation phase.