Patient trust has emerged as a serious issue in healthcare, as a variety of factors — including decreased access to healthcare, diminishing transparency around reimbursement policies and rising medical misinformation — erode the relationship between physicians and their patients.
Anthony Lefebvre, MD, a hospitalist in Minneapolis, told Becker’s that another contributor to the decline of patient trust has been the fragmentation of healthcare leadership at the state and federal level. Recent examples of this phenomenon include the increasingly wide variance among states regarding vaccination policies and the ongoing political strife within leadership at the nation’s top healthcare institutions, such as the CDC and HHS.
“It’s really creating tension, and will, I think, lead to patients saying, ‘Well, if it’s OK in one state, why is it not OK in another state? Without that cohesiveness across our country, I think it’s only going to get worse,” he said. “If there is a way to really bring that back, I think that would be really helpful.”
The rise of ChatGPT and other AI tools is a double-edged sword in the discourse around patient trust, as they greatly enhance the public accessibility of medical information — some reliable, some not.
According to a recent survey by the Physicians Foundation, 61% of physicians said their patients were influenced by medical misinformation or disinformation a moderate amount or a great deal of the time over the past year. The vast majority — 86% — of physicians said that the incidence of medical misinformation and disinformation among patients has increased in the past five years.
While some say the implementation of AI may also eliminate administrative burden for physicians, freeing them up to spend more time with patients, Dr. Lefebvre said that ultimately a more broadly unified approach to medicine would be helpful in combatting this trend.
“The ability to still connect with patients is really important. To empathize, to be at the bedside, to really give that personal attention to patients is really key, and I don’t think that will go away,” he said. “But without some broad umbrella of a unified statement, without a vacuum of leadership, it’s going to be challenging.”
Other regulatory burdens, like prior authorization, are also a significant contributor to the decline of patients’ trust in physicians.
“[Insurance companies] are a very outsized player in the healthcare space,” Dr. Lefebvre said. He recalled a recent case where a prior authorization process led to multiple days of delay in a patient’s care plan. “Those are wasted healthcare dollars.”
Prior authorization has been a vocal pain point among physicians for years, and many groups have advocated for its large-scale reform.
