This talk is via Zoom. Please contact Michael DeKay at dekay.3@osu for the link.
Dr. Victoria Shaffer
Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri
Title: Calibrating Patient and Physician Judgments about Hypertension Control: The Impact of Data Visualization
Abstract: Uncontrolled hypertension is a significant health problem in the US, though multiple drugs exist to effectively treat the disease. Shared data visualizations may help overcome clinical inertia by improving judgments about hypertension control. As part of a larger project developing data visualizations for the electronic medical record to support shared decision making for hypertension management, we assessed patient and physician judgments of hypertension control using different types of data visualization across 9 different studies. Patient and physician judgments of hypertension control are strongly and inappropriately influenced by the presence of outliers and variability in the data, which mask mean blood pressure values and the presence of data trends—important predictors of heart attack and stroke. Visualization type also significantly impacted perceptions of hypertension control. Raw data displays were perceived to be less well controlled by physicians and patients than displays that utilized a smoothing function. However, there were significant interactions between visualization type and patient numeracy, health literacy, and graph literacy. Generally, there was a much greater effect of visualization type for patients with greater numeracy and literacy. Visualizations employing the use of a LOESS smoothing function led to judgments by patients and physicians that were better calibrated with clinical guidelines. The effect was largest for patients with greater numeracy and literacy, suggesting that visualization type matters most for patients who can extract complex information from data.