This article investigates miscommunication in sequences of talk where an oncologist asks about patients' co-morbidities, that is, their other illnesses beyond cancer. Using conversation analysis, we examine ways in which the participants identify and manage two sources of miscommunication: a divergence in the doctor's and the patient's…

This study focuses on developing and applying methods/techniques in different aspects of the system for clinical text understanding, at both corpus and document level. We deal with two major research questions: First, we explore the question of "How to model the underlying relationships from clinical notes at corpus level?" Documents…

The relationship between verbal exchange in doctor-patient consultations and patients' comprehension has been measured by audio-tape recordings. The results provide objective evidence of differences in outcomes for similar presenting illnesses in different social groups, supporting the hypothesis that people in lower socioeconomic classes do not…

Like legal language, medical language is a private language, a separate stratum containing some words specially defined for medical purposes, some existing only in the medical vocabulary, and some adding precision or solemnity. These characteristics often cause a breakdown in patient-doctor communication. Analysis of data obtained from prototype…