‘Please doctor, no pins in my broken knee, I’m going on holiday tomorrow!’

Today it has been a month ago that my doctor told me that my knee fracture was officially healed. I can’t tell you how happy it made me to be able to walk normally again, wearing other clothes than leggings to fit under the huge blue brace I had to wear and climb the 48 steps to my apartment without help!

Though I’m very glad with this happy ending, this is not the reason why I want to share my story with you. I want to take you back in time, to the moment that I broke my knee and I all of the sudden found myself on the radiology department of the hospital and my personal experience of how emotions influence behavior.

At radiology, a very friendly nurse made an X-ray of my painful knee and without hesitation told me that it was clearly broken. She instructed me to go to first aid and see the doctors who would decide what the next steps would be. She kindly asked me if I was alright and able to walk. In shock, overwhelmed, startled, confused and worried about this news I responded with my everlasting ‘Yes, I’m fine’.

In the elevator I realized that I had already completely forgotten the nurse’s directions on where to find radiology. I asked someone for help and had to ask two or three more times before I eventually arrived at first aid. I guess I was just not able to remember the information that people gave me. My mind was completely occupied with only one thought ‘My knee is broken, and now what?’.

Well, that’s not completely true. I remembered the diagram I developed when I was consulting for the Council for Health and Society (Raad voor Volksgezondheid en Samenleving, RVS) about the ‘information position’ of patients. In this diagram I visualized how emotions overwhelm ratio when learning about a bad diagnosis. This is just temporarily, but very important to know if you want to understand how patients deal with information like the digital health file. And humbling through the aisles of the hospital I started to realize that I was there, right in this information dip - not able to digest new information. The weirdest thing was that I knew it was happening, but I couldn’t do anything about it. How hard I tried to man up. My emotions were so strong and overwhelming. I decided to call a dear friend for support, who fortunately came right away.

At the first aid department the staff took really good care of me. Two doctors visited me and informed me about my fracture, and the possibility of surgery. They would be putting pins in my bone to keep it at the right place. And as I had made plans to travel through Europe with a friend the next day, the possibility of surgery was again a total shock. I started to urge the doctors to not perform the surgery, because of this planned holiday. Fortunately, my friend arrived at the hospital just before I got really upset and guided me through the whole process.

The reason why I want to share this story with you is that this whole experience reminded me once again why I started ‘Living STATS’. There is this strange but interesting discrepancy between hard statistical data, often based on ratio (stats) and the human brain controlled by emotions, attitudes, biases and heuristics (the ‘living’). And this is exactly what Living STATS is trying to understand.

We cannot connect to our consumers, patients or citizens if we don’t take along the nature of human psychology - if we don’t really understand what drivers and barriers underpin the behavioral processes. It’s not so easy to get to this layer that’s under the surface, regular questioning or questionnaires only enter the first level. Our innovative and intuitive tools and techniques allows us to understand those deeper layers and learn more about actual decision making rather than the post-rationalization of a decision we get from traditional research.

I look forward to discuss how Living STAT’s approach to research can benefit your organization as well.

Rachel

#data #medical