A doctor’s ability to explain, listen and empathize has a profound impact on a patient’s care. Yet, as one survey found, two out of every three patients are discharged from the hospital without even knowing their diagnosis. Another study discovered that in over 60 percent of cases, patients misunderstood directions after a visit to their doctor’s office. And on average, physicians wait just 18 seconds before interrupting patients’ narratives of their symptoms. Evidently, we have a long way to go.
Three years ago, my colleagues and I started a program in Harrisburg designed to improve doctors’ communication with their patients. This large urban hospital system serves a city with a population of about 50,000, together with the surrounding metropolitan area of more than 550,000 people.
The hospital faces particular challenges: The city has a high poverty rate (32 percent, compared with the state average of 13 percent), and the metro area has a high rate of childhood obesity. Over all, nearly a third of people around Harrisburg are uninsured, compared with about one in 10 for the rest of Pennsylvania.
Our project started with a simple baseline assessment of how we as doctors communicated with our patients. Observation soon revealed that physicians introduced themselves on only about one in four occasions. And without an introduction, it’s no surprise that patients could correctly identify their physician only about a quarter of the time.
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