Understanding Patient Provider Conversations: What Are We Talking About?

Study Objectives: Effective patient-provider communication is a critical aspect of the delivery of high quality patient care; however, research regarding the conversational dynamics of an overall emergency, department (ED) visit is lacking. Identifying both patterns and relative frequency of utterances within these interactions will help to guide future efforts to improve the communication between patients and providers within the ED setting. The objective of this study was to analyze audio recordings of complete ED visits to characterize these conversations and determine the proportion of the conversation spent on different functional categories of communication.