How to be the best doctor for your patients, according to research

You have a wall full of accommodations, board certifications, and the respect of your peers. But do patients really care? Two researchers — a physician and a medical student — investigated what patients actually want in their doctors. The results might surprise you.

It turns out that patients just want to be cared for by someone they can relate to. When potential providers are heavily evaluated by a resume, their ability to empathize with patients becomes an afterthought, according to Shreya Kangovi, M.D., and Elena Butler. They presented their findings in a Harvard Business Review article, “Health Care Providers Are Hiring the Wrong People.” Kangovi and Butler say that emotional support is vital in patient recovery, and so is the need for community health workers. Their findings highlight a need to change how medical job candidates are screened, as well as how doctors behave in clinical practice, looking at these soft skills as well as traditional clinical skills. 

“Research shows that the majority of care that patients need isn’t actually on the medical side,” said Butler. “Community health workers help address issues in a way that a doctor or nurse isn’t specialized to do so.” 

Community oriented

Dr. Kangovi developed IMpaCT, a community health worker program that has developed a distinctive approach in hiring these medical professionals — one that perhaps hiring managers in healthcare institutions, and physicians looking to make themselves more effective and hirable, can learn from. Multiple randomized controlled trials have shown that IMpaCT community health workers have “helped improve health and quality while reducing hospital days by 65%.”

“Community health workers are not trained healthcare workers,” said Butler. “They are members of the community who are empathetic, want to help people and have an innate understanding of what patients are going through based on shared experiences.”

After extensive interviews with patients, the researchers identified altruism as a crucial trait in new hires. Instead of searching for candidates through an employment or job marketing website, they decided to circulate advertisements through soup kitchens and YMCAs, which proved to be successful. 

According to Butler, this method targeted people who were already eager to help the community, gave those with have limited access to technology the opportunity to apply and established that candidates did not need a background in medicine to be perfectly qualified. 

Doctors must re-evaluate their goals 

This research stresses that if doctors want to keep their patients healthy, focusing on their physical well-being exclusively is just not enough. Patients need holistic support from their medical team to recover, which could be achieved by more closely monitoring their mental health, finding common ground in conversation, or helping them re-acclimate to life outside of acute-care settings. 

Although community health workers are hired to provide patients with additional emotional support, there has still been a push for all medical professionals to develop strong interpersonal skills when they are still students, which often becomes an afterthought to textbook regurgitation, exam scores and biomedical knowledge.