Clinical empathy is often an overlooked, but necessary part of healthcare. Patients, particularly those with chronic conditions, need their physicians to express empathy to foster enhanced provider-patient relationships, according to MedCity News.
Here are 10 notes:
1. Clinical empathy has been linked to improved outcomes for patients with colds, depression and diabetes. Despite this correlation, many providers do not prioritize empathy with one study revealing physicians interrupt patients within an average of 18 seconds.
2. A study conducted in 2011 found that empathy decreased during medical school and residency due to the curriculum, experiences in clinical practices and stress.
3. Physicians also forgo empathy as a protective mechanism as a way to stifle the emotional trauma of losing a patient.
4. Providers additionally have less face time with patients due to increasing pressure from health systems and payers.
5. Medicare designed two programs to measure a patient's perception of physician in terms of quality care. Physician Quality Reporting includes measures such as whether the provider performed a tobacco screening or whether the population of his/her patients with diabetes had normal hemoglobin A1C levels.
6. The Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey consists of patient-reported measures such as "providers showed respect for what patient had to say." Such results may impact a provider's reimbursement.
7. While these programs are a step in the right direction, healthcare professionals must be trained to sufficiently meet all of a patient's needs.
8. In addition to training, the healthcare system needs to rethink how clinicians and administrators are organized to change the current hyper-specialized and disjointed healthcare system.
9. The Patient-Centered Medical Homes model has incentives coming from payers to practices that receive accreditation. This model of primary care is based on five characteristics including comprehensive care, patient-centered, coordinated care, accessible services and quality and safety.
10. The second primary care model utilizes bundled payments in which providers receive a flat fee per patient for a particular type of "episode."
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