Coding Categories for Investigating Medical Interviews: A Meta Classification

Abstract

Communication between patients and clinicians occurs in many different ways. Just as a patient's cardiac function cannot be fully characterized by a single measure, the communication between clinician and patient cannot be fully described by a single coding system. Different measures may concern distinctly different aspects of the medical encounter. This chapter reviews some of the measures that have been used to characterize medical interactions. To organize the variety of coding categories and systems into an understandable framework, we used a metaclassification—a classification of classifications.