Patients, Doctors, and Videotape: A Prescription for Creating Optimal Healing Environments?

Despite repeated calls for greater patient autonomy, shared decision making, and exploration of patient pref-erences, relatively little is known about how patients actually experience care as a face-to-face interactional process. A selected review of the literature in this area suggests that important asymmetries exist. Key among them is the tendency to report experiences from the point of view of only one member of the doctor-patient dyad. Thus, patients might report on their experiences of the system gone awry or professionals might attempt to understand the root cause(s) of an error by describing the conditions under which it occurred. Either way, information about the experience of care tends to be reported as a “my side ” telling. Optimal healing environments are defined as health care contexts that are based upon mutual respect and build positive, resilient relationships among participants, using the qualities and resources of those relationships to enhance health. Understanding optimal healing environments also requires a knowledge of how doctors and patients share time and space together in the consultation (an etic or outsider perspective) and also a knowl-edge of the participants ’ experience of their time together (an emic or insider perspective). After reviewing its methodological roots, the IMPACT approach (Interactive Methodology for Preserving and Analyzing Clinical Transactions) using videotaped encounters along with independent commentaries b