NYT Well Blog: Can Physicians Really Be Taught to Be Better Communicators?

With patient satisfaction quickly becoming a key quality metric tied to reimbursement, physician groups, health care systems and hospital networks have begun to invest in programs that aim to boost patient satisfaction by teaching physicians better ways to communicate with their patients. However, health care leaders considering purchasing such training programs for their physicians might want to read this New York Times "Well" blog post first.

Guest commentators Timothy Gilligan, M.D., co-director of the Center for Excellence in Healthcare Communication at the Cleveland Clinic, and Mikkael Sekeres, M.D., director of the leukemia program at the Cleveland Clinic, relate their personal experience attending one such physician communication training session and review the rather limited research on such training programs.

Their conclusion is that training can definitely teach physicians phrases and methods to use to "improve communication," but it is much harder, if not impossible, to boil genuine caring and empathy down into a teachable system that any physician can adopt. Therefore, don't count on communication training alone to boost patient satisfaction and well being. Patients can typically tell genuine interactions with their doctors from conversations driven by generic communication techniques.