Sometimes when I tell people I work on communication and healthcare, they think connectivity, like portals or messaging systems. And from that perspective, improving communication means more of it. It’s an understandable mix-up, and it points to an important distinction. Communication quantity is not the same as communication quality.
Hi, everybody. This is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. Since 2017, we’ve been giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement, experience, and satisfaction. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator specializing in communication and education. This podcast makes space to dig into what it’s easy to take for granted about communication in our professional lives, especially in healthcare and public health, but increasingly across sectors because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn and get inspired, but most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make. I help organizations act with clarity and confidence in complex, high-stakes situations. I’m currently booking consulting clients. You can work with me. Reach me on LinkedIn, on Instagram at Health Communication Partners, or at healthcommunicationpartners.com.
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So yeah, as I said in the beginning, sometimes people misunderstand me when I say I work on communication in healthcare. There are folks who assume I mean the stuff, like the equipment, channels, infrastructure, messaging platforms, forms of connectivity between
patient and provider. And I think that’s a reasonable assumption because that’s where so much of the investment has gone: whether the message can travel from one person to another. And there are also folks whose jobs involve improving communication with patients in the quantity sense. Like, are there enough of these messages? Do we need more messages, more channels, more check-ins?
All of that increases volume. I was on a call recently with a few folks saying “the patient communication space is flooded.” And I had to listen for a little while to see what they were talking about. And I saw eventually they were referring to like patient support tools, education materials, portals, apps, wearables, pharma resources, programs. And they’re right, yeah! From that perspective, it is flooded.
A patient in the middle of a diagnosis isn’t shy on resources. They’re drowning in them. There’s always more handouts, more logins, more emails telling them to go check the portal. So as a result, we all know we’ve got information overload. There’s contradictory advice. There’s increased cognitive burden to get through all of these things. There’s uncertainty about which sources to
trust. And I will use this as a chance to shout out to Renata Schiavo, Columbia University, on trust in health communication, who was on the show about a year ago. A couple real gangbuster episodes I’m going to go ahead and link to in the show notes.
But across these conversations I’ve been having with people about this volume, I have noticed less attention to how good was this communication, right? What are the quality of these messages? How are they when it comes to clarity or relevance, usability? Communicating more is not the same as communicating better.
And there’s data that I’ve seen recently that would seem to support this. There’s a benchmarking report from Candello who does malpractice insurance and they watch malpractice claims. They looked at whether communication-related malpractice claims had changed in the decade since they had last done a survey. And in that decade, we’ve had an awful lot of investment in connectivity, more documentation, more digital touch points. What did that do to communication-related malpractice claims? Spoiler alert, they went up.
The report said, “Communication failures, particularly between providers and patients or families, have become increasingly prominent. And they find that they “continue to drive patient safety errors with 40% of asserted MPL cases involving at least one breakdown in communication.” This was up from the approximately 30% of communication-related malpractice claims that they had found in 2015, the last time they ran the survey.
I think another clear sign that there’s a gap between quality and quantity, and that it’s real and not closing, is watching where patients go when they still have questions. Like, say it with me, to AI. People going to AI to get answers for their health questions is a huge topic, which I will tackle at another time. But my point is when someone leaves a visit without a clear enough picture of their own situation, their need for understanding doesn’t disappear because the visit ended. Sometimes it goes somewhere else. People go somewhere else to meet that need. People looking for answers when they still have questions is completely reasonable. I think AI is a reminder that people who want an explanation will keep looking for explanations until they find one that works, that makes sense for them.
But I wonder if maybe this isn’t kind of a side effect of treating communication as a quantity problem. We built more ways to send information to patients and for them to send it back. But somehow the quantity of that information was just assumed. Or maybe it was an afterthought. I don’t know. Both of those baffle me because you listen to this show. You know, we’ve got now decades of research showing how poor the quality of information is in digital health tools. We’re talking in terms of health literacy, relevance, clarity, accessibility.
To be clear, everyone I talk to thinks quality is important. I wonder though, if in the focus on quantity, There’s this implicit idea that if you say something enough times in enough places, it eventually gets through. Like exposure alone will equal understanding.
Now, if more contact equaled more understanding, quantity would always help. Higher quantity of contact would reliably yield better understanding.
Communicating more is not the same as communicating better.
Don’t get me wrong: repetition definitely has value. And yes, more exposure works for some things. reminders, appointment times. But not so well for understanding more complex ideas like a diagnosis or a treatment trade-off decision that you gotta make.
We can’t assume that with more communication quantity, that higher communication quality will necessarily follow. More contact does not equal better understanding.
Maybe we focus on communication quantity because It’s easy. Health literacy asks us to pay attention to how information is written so that it’s understandable and easier to act on. That’s much more complicated to do. And who knows, maybe AI will make it easier to improve communication quality. I think for all health professionals, I think for us, the ability to use AI to personalize communication for patients is exciting to think about. So far, mostly when I hear about it, it’s the quantity thing just kind of dressed up differently, not really changing like the quality of the communication for the actual person who’s getting it.
But if you know of someone doing something different or a group working on this, please let me know. I want to hear from you anyhow, health literacy friends, patient experience people, QI people in the house. Let me know what you think. Find me on LinkedIn or go to healthcommunicationpartners.com.
Because we’re producing more health information than ever before, and people have more ways than ever before to access it. But none of these innovations solve the fundamental problem if the underlying communication isn’t relevant, trustworthy, actionable,
and meaningful. If you need help with this, you know what to do. Contact me. This has been 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. Audio engineering and music from Joe Liebel. Additional music from Alexis Rounds. Thanks for listening to 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners, LLC.
