"Right, so that ten years ago... I grew up as a clinical trialist, and about ten years ago we started getting interested in understanding how people make decisions about clinical trials. And in our initial group studies we observed that doctors and patients have different expectations about what the outcomes of their treatment is going to be. And as an extension of that work most recently, we've studied how people think about clinical trials - both patients and doctors; and again found there that patients and doctors feel that the barriers for them are different than one another. So whereas patients rate it as the highest barrier, the fear of side effects of experimental therapy, doctors rated fear of side effects for patients as being very low in importance; so this sort of unrecognized what's important issue. And related to your question of, well, you know, from what our research had showed, where are we going and how is it affecting patient care: we've got from studies that focused really on decision-making, per say, and modeling decision-making into a recognition that the crux of decision-making is what happens in the patient/doctor dyad - what's actually being communicated back and forth.

"And so our current project is developing a web-based tool to provide patients with assistance on how to communicate with their doctor; and to gather some basic psycho-social information and information about the needs of the patients on-line before they get to the doctor, and then summarizing that information for the doctor - such that we can attempt to match the needs of the patients with what's delivered by your doctor."