How to Improve Doctor-Patient Connection Using Psychology to Optimize Healthcare Interactions

How to Improve Doctor-Patient Connection offers actionable steps for improving communication between health professionals and patients based on visual, auditory, and emotional understanding from the principles of cognitive psychology. Drawing on the author’s personal experience as both a healthcare professional and a mother of two children, How to Improve Doctor-Patient Connection explores communication between doctors and patients as well as bias in healthcare. This how-to text includes several practical applications that can be applied to healthcare encounters, enabling readers to form habits based on visual analysis of body language, auditory information from language and tone of voice, and logical emotion perception that will allow for improved doctor-patient connection. By integrating the perspectives of both doctors and patients and applying a psychological lens, this text is invaluable to healthcare practitioners, students of medicine, healthcare, biology, and related fields, and anyone looking to improve their own or other’s quality of doctor-patient interactions and overall healthcare experience.

Introduction 1 A Doctor’s Doctor: Showing humanity 2 Metacognition: Thinking about what you do in healthcare interactions 3 Diagnosis and Cognitive Bias: How your thinking can lead to error in healthcare interactions 4 Doctor-patient Connection: Thinking about how doctors and patients communicate 5 Visual Perception: Form an observing habit by thinking about what you see, fast and slow 6 Visual Data for Optimizing Healthcare Interactions 7 Auditory Perception: Form a listening habit by thinking about what you hear, fast and slow 8 Auditory Data for Optimizing Healthcare Interactions 9 Emotion Perception: Form a habit of emotional logic by thinking about what you feel, fast and slow 10 Emotion Data for Optimizing Healthcare Interactions 11 The Interplay of What You Feel, Hear, and See

Christine J. Ko, MD is a Professor of Dermatology and Pathology at Yale University. She has an abiding interest in visual perception and recognition and the parallels with auditory and emotional perception.