Artwork can also be important for stress reduction, Dr. Joseph said. She recalled a poster in her dentist’s office that featured various well-known people, like Lana Turner, with the heading, “What do these people have in common?”
“I asked the dental technician, who said, ‘Oh, they all died of oral cancer,’” she said. “Yes, you need education, but it doesn’t have to be gloom and doom.”
Dr. Stewart told me he wasn’t able, for various reasons, to renovate his office. But the suggestions stayed with him. He and two colleagues from the Pittsburgh School of Medicine gathered the Twitter data, performed a qualitative analysis of the replies and wrote a paper on the findings, which will be presented at the Society of Gynecologic Surgeons’ annual meeting in March.
One of the most popular comments, Dr. Stewart said, was a request to affix something on the ceiling above the exam table to distract patients from uncomfortable procedures — “‘Where’s Waldo?,’ a word search with anatomy words, a riddle, anything,” he said.
Dr. Stewart also said that all the comments had a similar theme: “Patients want to feel welcome. They want to feel safe. They want to feel respected.”
In recent years, there has been a rise in start-ups that aim to personalize the experience at the doctor’s office. For instance, when Carolyn Witte, a tech entrepreneur, decided to form a women’s health care company, she purposely focused on supportive design. She co-founded a clinic called Tia that has, among other things, temperature-controlled exam rooms and socks for the stirrups.
“And we have cloth robes instead of paper ones that also work for different body types, so your body parts are not popping out, which is how most women feel,” she said.
