The Power of Effective Clinical Communication

Healthcare is built on sacred and trusted relationships between patients and their clinicians. As medicine has moved into the 21st century, we’ve lost our focus on patients’ narratives and knowing one another’s stories as care team members. As a result, we have lost human connections and have created a broken healthcare delivery system that leaves patients and families frustrated and nurses and physicians burned out. The solution lies in reclaiming personal stories in medicine and finding technologies that recognize the power of voice and human-to human communication. Only when we gear our processes, our technologies, and our values around these sacred, healing relationships will we be able to restore humanity to healthcare.

I wrote a similar paragraph on an opening page of a recent report from the Experience Innovation Network, part of Vocera. The report is called Clinical Communication Deconstructed: A framework for successful, human-centered clinical communication. It examines how healthcare leaders are solving the challenges reflected in the infographic below.

Look for my upcoming series of blogs that will draw from the report, focusing on at least one core idea from it each month. We will highlight the voices of healthcare leaders and patients, and share stories and best practices that are making a difference in the lives of patients, families, and care teams.