Earlier this month, the University of Pennsylvania announced the Penn Medical Communication Research Institute (PMCRI), a collaboration between the Annenberg School for Communication and the Perelman School of Medicine, which will focus on reducing medical misinformation. The Institute will research methods for patients, particularly within vulnerable groups, to access reliable, useful medical information and develop strategies to increase the trust of healthcare providers and the scientific community.
The Institute is reflective of a growing momentum within medical education focused on combating medical and scientific misinformation. Schools are exploring a variety of methods to achieve this.
Brian G. Southwell, PhD, and Jamie L. Wood, PhD, Co-Directors of the Duke Program on Medical Misinformation, and Ann Marie Navar, MD, PhD, wrote in the American Journal of Public Health that, “Encountering patient-held misinformation offers an opportunity for clinicians to learn about patient values, preferences, comprehension, and information diets. Systematically training health care professionals to address patient-held misinformation with empathy and curiosity, acknowledging time and resource constraints, will be a crucial contribution toward future mitigation of medical misinformation.” In turn, Duke’s program, a part of the Duke Center for Community and Population Health Improvement, shares provider guidelines that promote developing “psychologically safe” relationships with patients. In other words, the patients should feel comfortable sharing the information and sources that they use to make medical decisions with their physicians and caregivers without fear of judgment or ridicule. Once physicians and the care team understand where the patient is coming from, they can provide support and guidance to correct misinformation and provide alternative, credible sources.
Other schools are incorporating communication techniques into the medical curriculum so that students can acquire the skills they need to reach broader audiences.
Last Spring at University of Chicago’s Prtizker Medical School, Vineet Arora, MD, MAPP and Sara Serritella, the Director of Communications at the Institute for Translational Medicine, developed and co-taught an elective course for first-year medical students titled, “Improving Scientific Communication and Addressing Misinformation.” Serritella, speaking to the critical nature of the course, cited a 2016 study by the National Science Foundation in which less than one-third of respondents said that they had a “clear understanding” of the meaning of “scientific study.” Medical students, she continued, need awareness of the gap between their understanding and that of the general public so that they can effectively bridge it. The course focused on teaching students the principles of scientific communication, how to identify misinformation, and how to debunk misinformation using infographics. But, more than that, it asked students to consider various audiences and ways to share information that were relatable, understandable, and relevant to those groups. Arora noted that students are well-positioned to play a key role in combating misinformation. “Addressing medical misinformation using evidence-based strategies is one way that medical students can add value and also learn a lifelong skill they will need to improve communication and trust in medical care for their patients,” he said.
At the University of Minnesota, Dr. Kristina Krohn, MD, an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine, saw a social media-specific need that medical students were well-positioned to breach in the early days of the pandemic. In the Spring of 2020, she developed an elective course titled “COVID-19: Outbreaks and the Media” that is still available. The goal of the course is to enable students to leverage social media to relay health information to the public. While the course offered general communications information including defining an objective and creating infographics, it also included basics such as how to create social media accounts, fact-check data, translate scientific literature into layman terms, and relay accurate information in simple, compelling ways… all via social media. Dr. Kohn explains the reasoning behind the course for medical students: “If we share publicly our knowledge in formats that are open and available to the public, we help people make better choices sooner, but we don’t learn how to do that in medical school. I think it’s a huge skill that we’ve overlooked, and social media has made it so that a medical student can do this. We just need to help them do it well and give them the appropriate teaching and tools,” she said.