Allyson
Bontempo

Allyson Bontempo's interests and research focus 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. The frameworks from which she pulls to understand the patient experience as shaped by the patient-clinician relationship during the diagnostic process are invalidation, trust, and clinician uncertainty (particularly, how these three frameworks intersect). Diagnostic contexts in which she is most interested are difficult-to-diagnose and contested health conditions. Her most recent work focuses on patients with endometriosis. Bontempo's faculty advisor is Lisa Mikesell.