An Information Design Tool to Reduce Cognitive Load in Older Adults with Chronic Degenerative Diseases During the Anamnesis Exploration Phase in a General Medical Consultation

During the general medical consultation protocol, there is a clinical exploration phase called anamnesis, which is carried out through an interrogation by the patient’s treating physician, where information such as patient identification data, reason for consultation, family history is collected., personal pathological history and psychosocial history, in order to obtain a retrospective of the patient and determine the relevant family, environmental and personal elements to generate an objective clinical history. However, breaking down the pathological history requires a great cognitive effort on the part of the patient, especially when it comes to older adults who suffer from one or more chronic diseases, which implies having extensive and permanent medical treatments, so it is imperative to generate an information design instrument that serves as a personal database where the patient can enter information about the medical treatment they carry out for their chronic diseases, with the aim of not losing any medication data related to their ailments and being able to transmit this information relevant to the physician during the anamnesis phase. Based on the above, this instrument was developed, taking into consideration the information needs of the doctor and the cognitive characteristics of the elderly, resulting in a type of control sheet to be filled out by the patient and easily delivered to the doctor. To evaluate the effectiveness of this piece of design, a perception test and a PSSUQ questionnaire were implemented for the elderly. This evaluation showed that using this tool reduces the stress of the patient during the consultation and solves the cognitive load that he had to do to transmit said information to his treating doctor.