The Third Annual

: Introduction: Doctor-patient communication skills is an essential part of the curriculum of medicalschools worldwide. As a relatively new discipline, teaching methods, as well as assessment tools, are still developing.No optimal tool has yet been developed to assess these skills. The more complex tools are more comprehensive andeasier to validate, but are too cumbersome for daily use. The more “practical” tools are less time consuming and are nottaxing of other resources, but are difficult to validate.Research Objectives: The purpose of this research is to evaluate some validity evidence for a new assessment tool(the Macy tool), which was developed to evaluate the communication skills of students or physician in an ObjectiveStructured Clinical Exam (OSCE), designed specially for this purpose. The new tool will be compared with anassessment tool which has been widely used in research literature for evaluation of doctor-patient communication(theRoter Interaction Analysis Systemthe RIAS).The Macy tool is a performance-based evaluation instrument, completed by the Standardized Patients (SPs). Thetheoretical model it is based upon is the Functional Model of Medical Interviewing (1). The Macy tool includes a list oftwenty-one consensus competencies that were agreed upon by a steering committee of experienced teachers ofcommunication skills at three medical schools, based on an extensive literature review.The RIAS is one of the most commonly used tools in medical communication research (2). It has a 40 category codingsystem, applied to the smallest unit of expression or statement (utterance) in the interview, to which a meaningful codecan be assigned. The conceptual framework for the RIAS coding is also the Functional Model of Medical Interviewing(1) but its adaptation to other models, like the Patient Centered Model (3), has also been demonstrated in the literature(4). The coding is verbal and assigns each utterance to a category, which is part of the exhaustive group of mutuallyexclusive categories, reflecting the medical interview in its different components.Methods: 58 videotapes of third-year medical students’ OSCE performance, obtained in a previous research for thepurpose of communication skills assessment will be used. The chosen videotapes were taken from two stations out ofthe ten, which had the largest N (for statistical purposes). The second station’s analysis will be considered as areplication of the first one.This research will analyze each interview, using both tools, and will compare the results. The comparison of the tools,which are a checklist and a rating scale, will be done by using previously researched theoretical constructs created fromthe RIAS categories (2,5,6,7) which will enable transforming the “neutral” rating scale into a ranking checklistlikescoring. Then, it will be possible to compare the resulting scores with the Macy tool’s categories. The end result is tocreate validity evidence for that new tool. Inter-rater and intra-rater reliability will be measured as well.Results: TBA.References1. Cohen-Cole S. The medical interview: The three function approach. St. Louis, MO: Mosby, 1991.2. Boon H, Stewart MA. (1998) patient –physician communication assessment instruments: 1986-1996 a review. Pat.Educ.& Counc. 1998; 35:161-1763. Stewart M, Brown JB, Weston WW, McWhinney IR., McWilliam CL, Freeman TR. Patient-Centered Medicine:Transforming the Clinical Method. Thousand Oaks (California): Sage, 1995.4. Roter D. The Roter Method of interaction process analysis. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.(1989;Revised in 2000)5. Roter DL, Stewart M, Putnam SM, Lipkin M, Stiles W, Inui TS. Communication Patterns of Primary CarePhysicians. JAMA.1997; 277: 350-3566. Bertakis KD, Roter D, Putnam SM. The relationship of physician medical interview style to patient satisfaction. TheJ Fam Prac. 1991; 32:175-1817. Hall JA, Dorman MC. What patients like about their medical care and how often they are asked: a meta-analysis ofthe satisfaction literature. Soc Sci Med. 1988; 27:935