EP203: Some Radical Common Sense About Listening to Patients, With Greg Makoul, Founder and CEO of PatientWisdom

Gregory Makoul, PhD, MS
Greg is founder and CEO of PatientWisdom, Inc. He is internationally recognized for expertise in physician-patient communication and shared decision making as well as a radical commonsense, person-centered approach to health care innovation. He started PatientWisdom because professional and personal experience made it clear that listening to patients—individually and at scale—is the real key to improving health and care.

01:05 How patient experience counteracts thin hospital margins.
01:28 Differentiating between patient experience and patient satisfaction.
02:19 How improving communication improves outcomes.
04:18 What’s important for the provider to understand?
04:47 Understanding the patient’s goals, the patient’s agenda, and how their health affects their lives.
05:43 “More than half of providers are reporting at least one symptom of [physician] burnout.”
08:48 Intersecting with chronic conditions.
10:00 Health care as transactional.
12:03 “The idea of feeling like a number instead of feeling like a person is something that we hear over and over.”
12:46 How PatientWisdom solves the conundrum of listening to the patient while also helping providers check off all their must-do tasks.
14:19 What happens when a patient feels as though their doctor knows them better?
15:35 “The focus ... is on finding out [what’s important] to the patients.”
17:54 The number of patient encounters PatientWisdom has run thus far.
18:12 Boiling down patient stories into insights.
22:02 How PatientWisdom turns patient answers into quantifiable insights and actionable points.
24:19 “We are not scoring a patient on a certain scale. We are boiling down, distilling what [they say] into themes and subthemes and, when it’s relevant, sentiment.”
26:25 How what PatientWisdom is doing is relevant to the leadership of health care organizations.
28:33 Surprising provider insights through ProviderWisdom.
30:56 The unique insights coming out of CommunityWisdom.