The relationship between patients and physicians has become increasingly strained in recent years as payer challenges, diminishing access and rising medical misinformation complicate the once straightforward dynamic.
Two physicians joined Becker’s to discuss how physicians can enrich their connection with patients and begin healing the physician-patient relationship.
Question: What, in your opinion, is the best way that physicians can maintain strong relationships with their patients amid numerous disruptors like staffing shortages, administrative burdens and rising medical misinformation?
Alon Weizer, MD. Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President, Mount Sinai Medical Center (Miami Beach, Fla.): The promise of generative and agentic AI to automate administrative tasks and manage straightforward interactions with patients is great. However, these solutions need to be implemented carefully as we have seen adding technology without taking away from current workload results in decreased effectiveness of clinicians instead of intended efficiencies. Patients are OK with technology managing straightforward issues.
However, like most consumers, we do not want to have a conversation with a chatbot when we believe we have an urgent or complex issue that requires another human being to help us. As physicians, we need to leverage solutions to help manage administrative and simple medical tasks and questions, while developing better systems that allow direct access of patients to our expertise when needed. This will require two things from physicians. First, we should look at implementing technology in tiers and monitoring how effective our systems are at escalating patient concerns through those layers. We also want to leverage multimodal communication with our patients. While phone calls or same-day visits with the physician are highly valued by patients, leveraging patient portals, asynchronous e-visits, and telehealth will allow us to maintain our connection with patients leveraging our expertise.
Medical misinformation represents both a challenge and opportunity for us as physicians. The challenge is that patients have great access to their own medical records and can query the large language model of their choice for information. What LLMs lack, however, is context and our opportunity as physicians is to leverage LLMs for the useful synthesis of medical literature and guidelines that apply to our patients conditions while helping patients understand the limits of AI related to clinical context and nuance that often exist due to the patient’s social, economic, medical, and cultural circumstances, to name a few items. Recent information I reviewed suggests that while there is some improvement in LLMs with adding more information into the model, there is a plateau in effectiveness based on this scalability model and the next evolution of AI will require a uniquely human skillset that is difficult at this point to replicate.
Fundamentally, humans create models and constructs of the world when synthesizing information. This ability to holistically integrate information and share this “model” with patients will continue to allow us to be effective partners with our patients that are not easily replaced by LLMs.
Eric Alper, MD. Senior Vice President and Chief Quality Officer at UMass Memorial Health (Worcester, Mass.): One of the most important things that physicians will continue to bring is the relationship and humanity. I continue to live by the quote that “the secret to caring for the patient is in caring for the patient.” Fundamental ethical principles like altruism and preserving autonomy; having the difficult conversations, the expression of empathy, and the preservation of trust by serving as the patient’s chief advocate. … All of these are increasingly difficult to do, especially with the challenges that you mention. But I believe that these will continue to be the foundation of effective medical practice, strong relationships with patients and a fulfilling medical career.
