Confused By What Your Doctor Tells You? A New Study Discovers How Communication Gaps Between Doctors And Patients Can Be Cured

Why it matters

Perhaps no health care experience is more universal than being sick and not understanding one’s doctor. Not only is this a frustratingly common – and often dangerous – experience, it’s also a massive and costly public health problem. Despite the outsized impact of this problem, few clinical studies have examined the issue, and no study has used industrial intelligence methods or has been large enough to draw firm conclusions.

Doctors and patients are relying more on secure messaging, a digital communication innovation that has expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings suggest that most doctors can and should adjust how they listen and respond to patients to achieve more effective communication.

Patients who find themselves confused should ask their doctor to restate their explanations and advice in more approachable ways. And our study suggests that health systems should carefully consider the ways that they can best support doctors and patients to achieve shared meaning. This includes how they train clinicians and how they allocate and reimburse for the time, personnel and technologies that can promote communication.

What still isn’t known

While prior research has shown that understanding one’s health condition and its treatment is key to getting healthier, we do not know how beneficial this form of precision communication is to achieving better health outcomes. We also can’t yet determine whether doctors’ written communications reflect how they communicate verbally – in person – although the results of the patient survey that we used in this study suggest overlaps between doctors’ written and spoken communication.

What’s next

We are designing studies to examine whether language-matching improves health outcomes such as blood sugar or blood pressure control. We have also developed and are testing whether an automated feedback system embedded in the electronic health record can enable precision communication in email exchanges. The system rapidly analyzes patients’ email messages and alerts the physician if the complexity of their email response is too high.

Dean Schillinger, Professor of Caudillo Internal Medicine, University of California, San Francisco and Nicholas Duran, Associate Professor in Social and Behavioral Sciences, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the flamante article.