Wonder What Your Doctors And Patients Talk About…Or Don’t Talk About…Behind Closed Exam Room Doors?

Soon you can stop wondering…

For the most us, our first patient experience was a trip to the Pediatrician’s office with our mother. As we age things don’t change much…the doctor’s office remains the center of most people’s “health care experience” except that now we are taking our parents to see the doctor.

Soon you can stop wondering…

The physician-patient relationship is and will continue to be the key stone holding together the rest of U.S. health care system. Why? Because the primary care physician’s office is where the vast majority of health care decisions are made and where most health care is delivered. We are still 13 times more likely to visit our doctor’s office than we are to require an overnight stay in the hospital.

What happens behind the closed doors of the exam room between doctor and patient drives everything else in health care – patient health status, patient adherence, referrals, ER visits, hospital admissions and re-admissions, patient satisfaction and so on. Other than our own personal experience and some vague top line satisfaction survey data, we health care professionals (non-physicians) really know very little about how doctors in our organizations talk with and relate to patients one another once the exam room door closes.

We Know Even Less About The Impact Of Different Styles of Physician-Patient On Our Organizations

For example, what impact does a paternalistic, physician-directed communication style have on patient activation and engagement in hospital-owned physician practices? Or how successful will a physician with poor patient- centered communication skills be when it comes to managing the health of a patient population in an ACO? Can physicians with poor communication skills hope to retain members attributed to the ACO? How much money will your organization forfeit next year in incentives and penalties due to poor physician-patient communications resulting in preventable re-admissions and sub-optimal patient experiences?

Exciting New Research Will Soon Provide You Invaluable New Insights Into How Physicians And Patients In Your Market Communication With One Another…And The Implications For Your Organization

It is not often that one gets the chance to become involved in landmark research. I guess this in my luck day. Working together with a corporate partner Verilogue in the upcoming months I will be analyzing the patient communication skills of 2,500 HIPPA-compliant physician-patient interviews collected from across the U.S. The goal of the research will be to deconstruct what primary care doctors and their patients say (and don’t say) to one another and how they say. We will then benchmark the patient communication skills of physicians in the study against agreed upon industry best practices – aka patient-centered communications. Ideally the results can be used by hospitals, physician groups, ACOs and health plans to improve the patient-centered communication skills of primary care physicians across the country.

Stay Tuned

As more details of this excite new research become available you will find them here at Mind the Gap first. I look forward to helping advance the field of physician-patient communications. More importantly, I look forward to doing what I can to disseminate and make actionable the finding on behalf of those who will benefits the most – patients.

What things would you like to learn from this research? Please let me know.

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