Developing Meaningful Review Questions With Patient Care in Mind

Peter Lio, MD, FAAD, is clinical assistant professor of dermatology and pediatrics at Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago, IL. In this video, Dr Lio reflects on developing review questions with patients in order to enhance comprehensive care and to build meaningful interactions.

Transcript:
Dr Lio: My personal area of interest, atopic dermatitis, is not nearly represented enough yet in Top Derm so, I'm pushing really hard to get more of that patient experience, to get more of those clinical decisions. In part because I think, in a way, it's easier. We've chosen a tough one to launch first, but a good one.

It's fact-based, almost a board's-review style, and it's great because it's just that the efficiency of learning is very, very high. It's also very challenging. To write a good board's-type question, you want it to be one that has a clear correct answer. You don't want it to be a "What am I thinking," so, it's taking a lot of work.

What I'm excited about is using a little bit more of the expert resources that we have in telling some more patient stories. I really believe that, if we do that, we can bring some of these other aspects that are harder to do on multiple choice question. Which is the most important to your patient, is it pain or itch? I don't know. They're both really important.

It's not well-suited for that, but we could tell it in the context of the story. You've done these treatments. The patient comes back. They do look better, but they're still complaining of pain and even itch, or itch and even pain at night, this sort of thing. Then it's like, "What would you do now?"

These are the things that I think can shape us clinically and are worth exploring. This is the place where we can dig much deeper into the evidence, the clinical evidence that's not always black and white like a board's-type question would be.