Research Finds Healing Goes Beyond Delivering Care

As a healthcare provider, you’re in a unique and respected role to drive behaviors within your practice and your patients that contribute to better health.

Rana L.A. Awdish, MD, and Leonard L. Berry explored these provider care issues and the impact on patients (and the bottom line) in a recent Harvard Business Review article.

The authors offered a few findings that health care leaders and providers can be powerful allies in not only helping patients “heal” physically, mentally and emotionally, but the daily environment with which providers work within has a profound impact on their ability to ultimately help those they serve.

“… Health care is becoming less focused on the intrinsic goal of healing and more on external forces that impede it,” Awdish and Berry wrote. “Increasing regulatory oversight, metrics that favor margin over mission, and delivery models that are not in full partnership with communities all divert attention and energy away from driving real change.”

At Arizona Care Network (ACN), our goal is to give our participating providers tools and resources that improve clinical insights and help streamline often-cumbersome administrative processes. These include dedicated Clinical Performance Consultants, a robust Provider Rewards Program, active referral management software, care gap analyses and patient care summaries.

By giving providers support and resources, we give them more time to pursue their real purpose: helping the healing process, no matter what that journey may look like, or even its end goal through a patient’s care.

Awdish and Berry describe four principles that can help healthcare leaders “provide” for the providers — proximity, mutuality, resilience and kindness. Doing so also allows for improved provider-patient dynamics within care: empathy, mutual decision-making and trust.

It’s no surprise, then, that fostering these attributes in practice employees often results in sharing the same dynamics with patients.

As Awdish and Berry note: “All patients need healing, and when clinicians and their institutions actively foster it, they renew themselves, too.”