Communications Lexi-vision (COMLEX) Project

The goal of the COMLEX projects is to develop tools for evaluating the quality of communications in healthcare for educational, clinical, and forensic purposes. COMLEX applies text mining tools (e.g. Leximancer™) to the analysis of communications in healthcare and the work is being performed in partnership with Queensland Health.

COMLEX Research Leader: A/Prof Marcus Watson

Pictured: William Billingsley, Cindy Gallois (10%), Andrew Smith (10%), Marcus Watson (20%).
Not pictured: Fernando Bernal, Timothy Marks, Michael Pickard (40%), Harold Cruz (40%).

For more information, see the COSE People pages.

What will COMLEX achieve?

Communication is a major contributor in 40% of all adverse patient events and in 70% of events that cause patients serious harm. Communication failures often happen in face-to-face contexts between healthcare practitioners during handovers, referrals, or rounds, or between healthcare practitioners and their patients. Despite the dangers associated with poor communication, little is done to capture and analyse verbal communication in healthcare.

At present, most assessment of communication in healthcare is done with paper-based checklists and surveys. We need better ways of capturing health communication, evaluating it, visualising the results, and putting in place means to improve communication. In the COMLEX project we will develop a means to capture healthcare communications in video, audio and text form. We will use the Leximancer™ text mining tool to extract concepts from conversation records and will display the result as concept maps. Concept maps can reveal topics of discussion and the relationship between those topics, so providing a basis to evaluate the effectiveness of communication. Templates for capturing and representing the concepts used by different healthcare workers in different contexts will provide structure.

Who will benefit?

• In medical and healthcare education, COMLEX will provide a quick and effective way of conveying to students whether their communication strategies are effective and how to improve them.
• In the clinical context, COMLEX will provide a near real-time record of how a patient's case is being handled, allowing quick recognition of diagnosis, interventions, therapeutic goals, and expectations.
• In a forensic context COMLEX can provide tools for investigating incidents and determining the role of any breakdowns of communication.

Key features

• Mechanisms for capturing communication episodes using speech recognition software
• Mechanisms for linking the replay of communication episodes with high-level lexical visualisation of communication content with (for example) concept maps
• Ability to draw in different templates that represent different organisational and professional contexts, against which to compare the current communication episodes.

Progress

We are well on the way to a technology demonstrator of the COMLEX software, focusing on the plug-in architecture and visualisation tools.

We have a strong partnership with Queensland Health's Skills Development Centre, where Watson is the Senior Director. Watson is already working with departmental directors in three tertiary teaching hospitals on communication training assessment.

Publications

See COSE Publications page

Search NICTA Publications.