Healthcare Provider–Healthcare Receiver Risk Communication: A Role–Information Matching Perspective

Distortions in healthcare provider - healthcare receiver communication often lead to cognitive bias, diagnostic errors, and medical conflicts. The information concretization and information abstraction hypotheses present contradictory risk communication models, which makes it difficult to determine clinical references for healthcare provider - healthcare receiver risk communication. We proposed and demonstrated a hypothesis of matching healthcare provider - healthcare receiver roles with concrete - abstract risk information. The processing accuracy of concrete (e.g. frequency) and abstract risk information (e.g. probability) was compared between healthcare providers and healthcare receivers. The results showed that healthcare providers tended to estimate abstract risk information more accurately than concrete risk information, whereas healthcare receivers tended to estimate concrete risk information more accurately than abstract risk information. This tendency was observed for textual (Study 1), graphical (Study 2), and role-playing (Study 3) risk communication. The processing fluency mediated the interaction of role and risk representation in risk estimation accuracy (Study 3). These findings provide new insights into the theoretical disputes regarding healthcare provider - receiver risk communication and effective communication strategies.