Page 208 - THE DUTCH TALKING TOUCH SCREEN QUESTIONNAIRE
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Chapter 5 and, if necessary, adapted and put into TTs. These TT questionnaires should be made available in different language versions, such as English, French, Spanish, Arabic and other languages which are commonly used by minority populations of a specific country. It may be interesting to add information about health, illness and treatment to the tools, so TTs can be turned into ‘health information kiosks’. Kiosks are free-standing units containing computers that provide users with information services such as health education programs \[57\]. The results of evaluation of the usefulness of such kiosks is promising but, to the best of our knowledge, such kiosks have not yet been developed to be usable by users with low health literacy. Research is needed to investigate if it is possible to make those kiosks user-friendly and effective in gathering PROs and giving health information to ‘real life patient populations’, including patients with low functional health literacy. More research is also needed to get insights in other possible platforms, as well as funds that will help develop and implement the use of TTs in research and clinical practice. Developing TTs has proven to be a very labor- and time-consuming, and therefore expensive, process. On the other hand, having usable, valid and reliable TTs may well save a lot of time and money in the future. Physical therapists that participated in this research project told the researchers that assisting vulnerable patients in completing PROs could take them up to one and a half hours of treatment time at the beginning and the end of a treatment process while, at the same time, they feared the risk of interviewer bias \[53\]. It is also known that low health literacy in itself influences provider-patient interaction negatively \[8\] which leads to suboptimal health outcomes. Therefore, research needs to be done to investigate whether TTs can lower staff burden and costs and increase health outcomes by means of increasing the quality of provider-patient interaction, through enabling vulnerable patients to autonomously complete questionnaires which provide valid and reliable PROs. Adding safe software to TTs which transport outcomes safely to electronic patient files, without human interference, would reduce staff burden and costs even more. If research shows that the use of TTs reduces costs and increases quality of care, investing in the development of TTs containing large amounts of questionnaires in various language versions may become interesting to health insurance companies and health care providers. 208 


































































































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