Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

31 PATIENT EXPERIENCE Harvard/Politico: Americans trust physician offices more than hospitals, payers with their data By Morgan Haefner W hile only 7 percent of adults say they trust search engines like Goo- gle to keep their data private, sentiment is much different for health- care organizations, according to a poll by Politico and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. The poll, conducted with 1,009 adults by telephone from July 16-21, found that of 11 institutions, Americans have the greatest trust in healthcare and banking companies. Specifically, 34 percent of adults said they trust their physician's office will keep their personal data secure. Fewer respondents — 24 percent — said the same about hospitals, and only 17 percent said the same about their health insurers. When it comes to adults who searched for health information or health prod- ucts online, 30 percent expressed concern about how their search data would be used by companies trying to sell them medical goods or treatment. The Harvard/Politico poll also looked at adults' use and trust in patient portals. Twenty-three percent of adults never set up a patient portal. Of those who do use patient portals, the poll found 81 percent of adults use the portal to check test results, while 59 percent use it to schedule appointments and 42 use it to request a prescription refill. Twenty-six percent of respondents expressed concern about their portal data being accessed by an unauthorized person. n Patients often too embarrassed to share health threats with physicians, study finds By Anuja Vaidya P eople tend to withhold information about imminent health threats they are facing, such as suicidal thoughts or sexual assault, from their clini- cians, citing embarrassment as one reason for not disclosing the infor- mation, according to a study published in JAMA Network Open. Researchers examined results from two national surveys of U.S. adults. One survey included 2,011 participants recruited in March 2015, while the other included 2,499 participants recruited in November 2015. Of the participants, 1,292 in the first survey and 1,453 in the second reported experiencing one of four imminent threats: Depression, suicidality, abuse or sexual assault. Among the 1,292 participants in the first survey experiencing one of the health threats, 47.5 percent withheld information from their clinician. Also, 40 percent of participants withheld information from their clinician among the 1,453 participants in the second survey experiencing one of the threats. The most common reasons for withholding information included being em- barrassed; not wanting to be judged or lectured; and not wanting to engage in difficult follow-up processes and behavior. Women and those who were younger had higher odds of withholding infor- mation in both surveys. n 4 in 10 cancer patients lack support to deal with symptoms, survey finds By Anne-Marie Kommers T hirty-nine percent of cancer patients lack support in dealing with symptoms and side effects, and about a third feel they don't have enough information about their cancer and treatment, according to a survey from the All.Can initiative. e survey was conducted from January to November 2018 by Quality Health, a U.K.- based specialist health and social care survey, while All.Can provided input. e survey asked 4,000 cancer patients in 10 countries about their experiences. Five things to know about the survey: 1. Twenty-six percent of respondents said they experienced the most inefficiency in di- agnosis. Issues with diagnosis included lack of empathy and poor timing, such as informing a patient they had cancer on Friday but telling them to wait until the following week for more information. 2. Nearly half of respondents felt they were not sufficiently involved in treatment decisions. irty-one percent said they were not given enough information on dealing with pain. 3. All.Can recommends more patients receive multidisciplinary care for their cancer. Only 34 percent of respondents who said they needed psychological support actually had that support available, for example. 4. e most common non-treatment-related costs for patients were travel costs (accord- ing to 36 percent of respondents) and loss of employment income (26 percent). Some experienced lifelong financial insecurity due to their cancer. 5. e survey only looked at developed coun- tries, such as the U.S. and the U.K., which means the results may not apply to other ar- eas of the world, reported STAT. In addition, the All.Can initiative is funded in part by six pharmaceutical companies. n

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