DCE Useful Tips and Tricks

Just like with any patient, HOW you word questions is as important as WHAT question you’re asking. Our patients respond to over 200,000 questions. However, there are a few strategies that will help collect the information you need to assess your patient.

Provide Context

Context is important. Our patients will answer questions directly, regardless of the flow of conversation. Each question you ask needs to work independently. For example, let’s say you are talking to Danny about allergies, and he reports a strawberry allergy. If you want to follow up with asking about symptoms to strawberry exposure, don’t ask “What are your symptoms?”. Instead, ask “What are your allergy symptoms?” This will allow you to get the answer you’re actually looking for.

Keep Questions Simple

Keeping questions limited to one topic at a time will help your patient understand you better. Instead of asking “Do you take drugs or alcohol?”, ask about drugs and alcohol separately. Asking about both at the same time may end up with the patient answering about only one subject, but you may not know which.

Avoid Pronouns

Our patients respond best when you specifically refer to people or objects. Avoid referring to the foot you just asked Tina about as “it” in a follow up question. While this may seem tedious to type out the full noun, it’s much harder to deal with a finding you think should have unlocked, but a pronoun prevented it.

Reopening an Assignment

If your instructor set your assignment to allow reopening, you are able to re-enter the assignment attempt after completing it to add to your assignment attempt and improve your grade. All the information previously in the assignment will still be saved if you do this. Please click here to learn how to Reopen your assignment attempts.