Allyson C. Bontempo, MCIS
Doctoral Candidate
School of Communication and Information

Lisa Mikesell, PhD
Assistant Professor of Communication
School of Communication and Information

Allyson Bontempo’s interests and research focus on improving patient experience. Her work targets three areas crucial to patient experience: diagnostic delay, the patient-clinician relationship, and patient support networks including online communities. Her work seeks to better understand how patient relationships with clinicians work in concert with patients’ broader support networks outside of the healthcare system to shape the patient experience, particularly around issues of diagnosis. Her most recent work focuses on patients with endometriosis.

Lisa Mikesell’s research consists of three intertwining threads guided by an interest in patient engagement in the clinic and community. (1) The first thread is situated in community contexts and examines the situated interactional practices of individuals diagnosed with neurological and psychiatric disorders to provide a grounded perspective on competence, everyday functioning, and patient engagement. (2) The second thread is situated in clinic contexts and is informed by her work in the community. Reling on video-based analyses, this work helps identify (in)effective communication practices in clinic contexts and provides an ecologically sensitive lens on applications of patient-centeredness, shared decision-making, and the use of decision support strategies in the clinic. (3) The third thread highlights patient engagement in the collective sense by exploring the practices, perceptions, and ethics of community-engagement and community-based participatory research (CBPR) in health and clinical research.