Communicating Bad News: Insights for the Design of Consumer Health Technologies.

The results from this study identify specific strategies for health information technologies to better promote empathic communication when they communicate concerning health news. We distill the findings from our study into design hypotheses for ways technologies may be able to help people better cope with the possibility of receiving bad health news, including tailoring the delivery of information to the patients' individual preferences, supporting interfaces for sharing patients' context, mitigating emotional stress from self-monitoring data, and identifying clear, actionable steps patients can take next.