Communication barriers in patient-provider interactions project graphic
Research on communication barriers and adaptive support in healthcare.

Led by MINDxAI Lab PhD student Moajjem Hossain Chowdhury with Dr. Yunmei Liu, “Communication Barriers in Patient-Provider Interactions in Health Care: Scoping Review” is now available open access in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

Beyond a List of Communication Barriers

Following PRISMA-ScR, the review searched four databases, screened 6,233 records, and synthesized 253 empirical studies. It integrates linguistic, cultural, psychological, and patient–provider mental-model barriers into one framework, showing how they overlap and relate to patient experience, healthcare access, clinical decision-making, and health outcomes.

The synthesis identifies important gaps, including limited research on psychological and mental-model barriers and a lack of real-time behavioral, nonverbal, and physiological indicators. These findings provide a foundation for future interventions and technology development: adaptive support requires understanding which barriers are present, how they interact, and how they can be recognized during clinical encounters.

The lab’s next phase will move from evidence synthesis to empirical data analysis, examining how these barriers, individually and jointly, are associated with healthcare experiences and outcomes.

Read the publication in JMIR