Rutgers University
Allyson Bontempo is a PhD student at Rutgers University studying health communication with an emphasis on patient-provider communication. She holds an MA in health communication from Rutgers University, a BS in psychology and English from Sacred Heart University, and completed 40 PhD credits in clinical psychology.
Her research focuses on improving patient experience. Her work targets three areas crucial to patient experience: diagnostic error, 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 current work focuses on patients with endometriosis.
When Allyson Bontempo set out to understand how endometriosis patients engage in online communities, she had hoped to recruit a modest number of survey participants to answer questions that would illuminate the interplay between how their experiences…