About
AWCL stands for Anxiety-Weighted Cognitive Load. It scores whether medical material is built to remove what amplifies a patient’s anxiety, so the message can get through.
I built it from my father's writing, in his honor.
“Being a patient isn’t easy and being a patient with cancer can be very unnerving. Having cancer may place you in an irrational world.”
Robert Rodvien, M.D. · hematologist-oncologist · from his writing for patients
My father spent four decades as a hematologist-oncologist, explaining medicine to frightened people. He wrote for them too: guides for people living with cancer, and a book-length manuscript on cancer and anxiety.
I’m not a clinician. I’m a communication systems specialist with a clinical inheritance. That combination is the whole point.
For years I worked alongside oncology teams, producing patient education video that translated clinical content into something an anxious patient could actually receive. AWCL began as a way to formalize what I was doing intuitively in that work, and what my father had been doing intuitively in his writing. Over years of refinement, it became an instrument.