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One of the best ways to achieve a sense of community in health care is through storytelling. Stories make for good medicine. They inspire empathy, laughter, hope and healing. Because we can relate to the experiences of human beings as told in stories, we more easily learn and retain information presented that way.

By its very nature, health care has a wealth of wonderful stories to tell. This is a field that is about life ...

Effective communication is critical, particularly in the health care setting. It is an important component of high-quality care and helps achieve better outcomes. It is estimated that as much as 50% of substandard care is related directly or indirectly to physicians’ communication with patients. And patients sense it; poor communication scores are leading contributors to poor overall satisfaction scores.

Building better relationships with patients means overcoming some verbal and non-verbal behaviors that impede real communication. ...

As providers and hospitals adjust to the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Provider and Systems (HCAHPS) survey instrument, several questions have arisen about the CAHPS response categories. The HCAHPS survey asks patients to evaluate how often a specific event occurred during their stay in the hospital. The responses range from “never” to “always,” with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) regarding “always” as the optimum answer. Many providers have wondered if satisfaction scales, ...

Patient satisfaction scores are increasingly used to help determine physician compensation, so it’s no surprise that physicians are becoming more concerned about those scores, and, understandably, questioning them. Reactions range from healthy skepticism to outright rejection. The reactions may be based on misunderstanding or ignorance, on a heavy-handed application of rules by administrators or as part of a larger distrust of institutions outside of medicine. Physicians should know how their scores were determined, the science ...