Last week, we touched on the trust equation and why trust in doctors is eroding. Today I want to focus a bit more on the second half of the equation – listening – and show how this going awry contributes to the crisis of physician mistrust.
The Value of Listening
What do functional medicine practitioners, chiropractors, nurses, and online influencers all have in common? They have all perfected the art of listening to a client, a patient, or their audience. It’s not that the quality of the advice they give is superior; it’s that these professionals’ presence and listening ability is superior to that of the average physician. If the advice isn’t immediately or overtly harmful, most people, when they feel listened to, will trust the advice they’re given regarding their healthcare – even if the quality is suspect. This effect is multiplied when the person doing the listening has higher access to the person seeking advice, as we discussed in our first post.
In the past, “good listeners” didn’t have the same degree of access to patients that a patient’s doctor did, and people would often seek out a physician for advice because that’s just what you did when you were sick. That all changed with the advent of the Internet. Now, the barrier to access for any of these “good listener” professions for patients is essentially nil. Anyone can start a podcast, YouTube channel, or microbrand in an afternoon, regardless of qualifications. They can tune their message based on real-time feedback about what engages, and tailor their content to the preferences of their audience, telling them what they want to hear. They can advertise recklessly and reach a broad audience without much interference from anyone. With the advent of AI, this barrier to entry has become even lower, with tools that allow patients to ask clinical questions directly to the hivemind rather than waiting for a callback from the office.
Three Strategies for Building Trust
So what’s a doctor looking to build trust to do in this environment, when faced with these challenges? Well, one strategy is to improve the perception of time spent listening – and I’m not talking about increasing the number of appointments available to patients. I’m talking about lowering the barrier to contact with patients. In the most extreme form, this looks like concierge care – docs giving out their cell phone to patients and inviting them to call them anytime, or text with questions. Effective? Certainly. Sustainable at scale? Maybe not. More likely, it looks like presence – engaging actively in the physical and online spaces where patients spend most of their time. For some, this might mean starting a TikTok or a blog. For others, it might mean sponsoring a local youth sports team or participating in community events. Not everyone needs to be a socialite, but an authentic presence is essential in building trust, whether in the exam room or out of it.
Another strategy for improving active listening organizationally is empowering staff to answer questions. You might not be Dr. Warmth in the exam room, but your secretary or medical assistant can build trust with your patients with every interaction. I’ve known patients who don’t get along with their specialists, but will keep returning to the same office because the staff there is so lovely. Conversely, I know patients who loved the doctor but couldn’t stand the staff and stopped going. The sum of these interactions with your office matters and factors heavily when it comes to patient trust.
A third strategy is leveraging technology, whether AI or process improvement, to incorporate patient feedback into care delivery. If implemented selectively, these things have the potential to deliver on the experience and build trust, but it must be done with extensive input from both clinicians and patients. When making these types of adjustments, they need to be done through the lens of trust-building and with an eye towards the patient experience rather than clinical efficiency – which is most commonly how these types of tools are employed.
Start With Listening, Build to Trust
Good advice can only reach patients if you have already achieved the goal of lowering the barrier to building a relationship with patients, and you’ve worked on your listening skills enough to personalize the approach to their care. But once you get to that point, it’s a massive multiplier. The trick for the organization and the individual doc in building trust is figuring out how to optimize the two components of the trust equation to ensure patients get good advice, not just advice that aligns with what they want to hear. I’d argue that doing this at scale is one of the central challenges of healthcare delivery and where things frequently fall apart. Our final post will focus on delivering trust at scale.