Brian J. Zikmund-Fisher, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education at University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. He also is a Research Assistant Professor in their Internal Medicine Department and affiliated with several other University of Michigan’s programs. With a background in decision psychology and behavioral economics, Dr. Zikmund-Fisher teaches, researches, and writes about meaningful ways to communicate risk and other number-based health messages.
In this podcast, Dr. Zikmund-Fisher talks with Helen Osborne about:
- How all risk communications are not the same.
- The responsibility of the communicator to consider the spectrum of patient’s needs before deciding what to provide.
- How to align the format of risk information to its purpose. In other words, how to know when we want numbers and when we might not.
- The pros and cons of different formats for discussing risk including icon arrays and other visual ways of showing probabilities, labels that group numbers into categories, and narratives that recount lived experience but ignore probability.
- Thoughts about the history and future of risk communication.
More Ways to Learn:
- Zikmund-Fisher BJ, “The Right Tool is What They Need, Not What We Have: A Taxonomy of Appropriate Levels of Precision in Patient Risk Communication,” Medical Care Research and Review. Published online September 6, 2012. Full text available at http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/98434
- Icon Array, a free online tool to communicate your risk information in a matrix, http://www.iconarray.com
Health Literacy from A to Z: Practical Ways to Communicate Your Health Message, Second Edition (Updated 2018), by Helen Osborne. Relevant chapters include: 8, 9, 11, 13, 26, 38.
Read a transcript of this podcast.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download