How To Be The Best Doctor For Your Patients, According To Research

You have a wall full of accommodations, board certifications, and the respect of your peers. But do patients really care? Two researchers — a physician and a medical student — investigated what patients actually want in their doctors. The results might surprise you.

​

It turns out that patients just want to be cared for by someone they can relate to. When potential providers are heavily evaluated by a resume, their ability to empathize with patients becomes an afterthought, according to Shreya Kangovi, M.D., and Elena Butler. They presented their findings in a Harvard Business Review article, “Health Care Providers Are Hiring the Wrong People.” Kangovi and Butler say that emotional support is vital in patient recovery, and so is the need for community health workers. Their findings highlight a need to change how medical job candidates are screened, as well as how doctors behave in clinical practice, looking at these soft skills as well as traditional clinical skills.

“Research shows that the majority of care that patients need isn’t actually on the medical side,” said Butler. “Community health workers help address issues in a way that a doctor or nurse isn’t specialized to do so.”

Community oriented

Dr. Kangovi developed IMpaCT, a community health worker program that has developed a distinctive approach in hiring these medical professionals — one that perhaps hiring managers in healthcare institutions, and physicians looking to make themselves more effective and hirable, can learn from. Multiple randomized controlled trials have shown that IMpaCT community health workers have “helped improve health and quality while reducing hospital days by 65%.”

“Community health workers are not trained healthcare workers,” said Butler. “They are members of the community who are empathetic, want to help people and have an innate understanding of what patients are going through based on shared experiences.”

After extensive interviews with patients, the researchers identified altruism as a crucial trait in new hires. Instead of searching for candidates through an employment or job marketing website, they decided to circulate advertisements through soup kitchens and YMCAs, which proved to be successful.

According to Butler, this method targeted people who were already eager to help the community, gave those with have limited access to technology the opportunity to apply and established that candidates did not need a background in medicine to be perfectly qualified.

Doctors must re-evaluate their goals

This research stresses that if doctors want to keep their patients healthy, focusing on their physical well-being exclusively is just not enough. Patients need holistic support from their medical team to recover, which could be achieved by more closely monitoring their mental health, finding common ground in conversation, or helping them re-acclimate to life outside of acute-care settings.

Although community health workers are hired to provide patients with additional emotional support, there has still been a push for all medical professionals to develop strong interpersonal skills when they are still students, which often becomes an afterthought to textbook regurgitation, exam scores and biomedical knowledge.

“I think medical school should focus more on interpersonal and professional skills, like empathy and communication,” said Butler. “I’m just a big believer in trying to create as many real-world simulations for medical students as possible.”

As for the future of community health worker programs like IMpaCT, Butler and Kangovi hope to create more individualized treatment plans that cater to the distinct needs of each patient. Their research has shown that instead of feeling supported and heard by their doctors and nurses, patients often feel that they are being looked down upon. They hope this work will inspire all medical professionals to prioritize the needs of their patients over outdated industry priorities by dispelling the notion that patients and doctors must maintain a strictly professional relationship.

“A point of pride is that we evaluate our work and make sure it does right by our patients,” said Butler. “Is there a lighter touch model? Some may only need check-ins every so often. We want to segment patients to give them intervention that is most effective for their goals.”

Although Kangovi and Butler’s research details flaws in the medical world, they believe their work sheds light on a universal issue — a focus on skills over traits, as well as personal and industry biases, leave qualified candidates in the dark.

“Of course our audience was health care leaders, but we got feedback from readers outside of health care that this was relevant,” said Butler. “ We can all hire more thoughtfully. I want to see organizations dispel these outdated systems and reevaluate how they are hiring.”

Source