Communication of Uncertainty in Clinical Genetics Patient Health Communication Systems

Contents

This paper presents an overview of communication of uncertainty in genetic counseling patient letters, and its implications for the design of patient-tailored communication systems. A system designer should take into account the prevalence of uncertainty expressions. Many can be analyzed as giving conditional probabilities. Often, the probability values are qualitative or imprecise. Thus, we discuss use of a hybrid Bayesian/Qualitative probabilistic network domain model for this type of system.