Quick ways to up your game in patient communication. I’ve done the prompt design work for you!

Have you been using chat GPT? Yeah, me too. So in today’s episode, I’m going to share six chat GPT prompts you can use to improve your patient communication.

Hi, everybody. This is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, ranked #20 in the top 100 podcasts in Social Sciences, giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement, experience, and satisfaction since 2017. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator with expertise in communication and education. I’m here to dig into some of what we might take for granted about communication in our professional lives. If you want to strengthen the work you can do in your professional sphere, this is a place for you because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make. If you value this show, the stories and inspiration and research, I’ve got good news. I can help your organization. Visit healthcommunicationpartners .com and click on contact or connect with me on LinkedIn.

So these prompts are for when you want or need to change up your spiel, that thing that you explain many, many times a day. This isn’t talking about doing research here. This is for when you want a different way or an additional way to say what you’ve been saying. Because we all want to be as effective as possible, and having multiple ways to say something is a powerful tool to have as an educator and a communicator.

Having additional options for explaining something can help when there are cultural or linguistic differences. It’s going to help because people’s emotional states can also affect their understanding. Because we’ve got people dealing with fear or stress or pain or all of the above and they might not process information really well the first time they hear something. And giving them an additional option can give them more ways to understand, and more time to process. And having more than one way to explain something can also kind of open up the topic for discussion, for questions, for engagement. Because you’re presenting multiple options to people, they know there’s more than one way to think about this. You might even ask them which of these did they prefer or there were parts of one explanation that they liked more than another. And it gives them a chance to not just sit back and listen.

So of course I used chatGPT in this episode. I asked it about different ways a health professional could explain a common medical condition, if they wanted to do it in multiple ways. It came up with six examples and chose hypertension as the case. Those six examples were: use plain language, use a visual, metaphor or analogy, a written or digital summary, a video or app, and teach-back. Now that’s a pretty good list. I think those are all things that it’s good to be reminded of. But I’m also guessing you’re probably doing most of them already because you listen to the show and we’ve talked about all of those before.

So I wanted to dig a little bit deeper, right? You want to up your game. That’s why you’re listening to this. And this is a riff on one of our early episodes that I called 10 Ways to explain the same thing. Basically having more options being better for learning and communication. So I grabbed some of the items from that episode and put them through chatGPT.

What I’m going to do is tell you the prompt so that you can copy it and use it. And then I’ll give you like a little bit of a snippet of what the output was so you can get a sense of, okay, would that sort of an approach work for what it is that you have to explain.

Now, an adult who may not have a medical background, you might also want to put in there an adult who may use a language other than English at home. So, go ahead and throw that phrase in there too, to help with the plain language-ness of it, but I did not do that for these examples, but I want to at least throw that in there as an option for you to play with.

Okay, let me tell you what chat GPT said about the story: “Let me tell you a quick story that might help explain what high blood pressure is. Imagine a small town with a water system that delivers water to every house through a network of pipes. For years, the water flows just right. Not too fast, not too slow. The pipes stay strong and the houses all get what they need.” And then, you know, the conflict happens, the high blood pressure, and it goes on from there. I kind of like the goldilocks and the three bears kind of feel that that one has to it.

Here’s what it said. “Let’s break high blood pressure down into parts so it’s easier to understand. First, think about your heart. It’s a pump that pushes blood through your body. Next, think about your blood vessels, like flexible tubes that carry the blood to all of your organs and tissues. Then there’s the blood itself.” And the explanation continues on.

What I got: “Let’s walk through how high blood pressure can affect the body over time. In the beginning, your heart and blood vessels work together smoothly. Your heart pumps blood and your arteries carry it away to the rest of your body.” Goes on from there.

Well, chat did really well here: “Let’s think about how your blood flows through your arteries like water through a garden hose. When everything is working normally, like a hose with water flowing at the right speed, your blood pressure is in a healthy range. The heart pumps, the blood moves smoothly, and the hose or artery stays strong. But with high blood pressure, it’s like turning the water up too high. The pressure inside the hose increases. Over time, that high pressure can wear out the hose. Or, in your case, damage your arteries, your heart, even your kidneys or eyes.”

Now for the last two, I’m going to share the prompts, but not the output, and I’ll tell you why.

#5 is general to particular. I wrote,

It did okay here, but I didn’t find it illuminated much, and it didn’t have kind of the punch and the flavor of some of the other examples for hypertension. So it might do well with the topic that you have to explain though, so you want to give general to particular a shot.

And finally,

Well, it did a really well here, maybe no surprise. I think GPTs are good for this kind of work, but I’m not sharing this with you, because you’re probably already doing cause and effect. But I do want to mention: a nice extra was that it offered to generate a visual for you with icons or turn it into a flyer. And now we’re getting into health literacy land. So, if you do go that way and ask for it to generate some text that you want to share, make sure before you send it out, you have a health literacy expert look it over.

Okay, three thoughts I want to leave you with to end up this episode.

One, remember these programs get things wrong. You’re the expert here. Obviously, you want to check everything for factual correctness. And I apologize to any of the experts in hypertension out there who were cringing at things that the chat got wrong. Sorry about that.

Secondly, we know the gold standard is co-creating with your patient. So think about telling your patient that you’re trying a new explanation. What did they think of it? How could you improve your explanation? And maybe have they heard or seen an explanation that they liked? And you borrow that for next time.

And a gentle reminder, you already know, your patients are not empty vessels devoid of knowledge. So make sure before you get into your snazzy new spiel, that you ask them what they already know or think about the topic, and reinforce whatever they say that’s accurate.

The point of all of this is for you to have a few explanations in your pocket that you feel comfortable saying. So obviously you’re going to rework the wording so it feels natural to you. So you have options and so your patients have options. You’ve got to like it enough to say it, but ultimately success is determined by how much your patients like it and what they take away from it.

Now, if you like thinking about AI and health communication, you’ll want to tune into our next episode where I interview Dr. Ayo Ologoke and we talk about further ways that AI can help support you in your health communication work.

If your organization wants help with health communication, with or without chat GPT, give me a call, connect with me on LinkedIn, or visit healthcommunicationpartners .com and click on contact. 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 HealthCommunication Partners, LLC. Find us at healthcommunicationpartners .com.

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My guest today is Joel Helbling from Test Double, a fully remote software consultancy. While Joel doesn't work in the health sector, I hope you find his insights into team communication, feedback, and change are relevant. Joel shares how his team stays connected and effective without the benefit of in-person interaction, through intentional communication, feedback, and collaboration.

Today's episode is about what the health sector can learn from a remote tech team. I'm joined by Joel Helbling from Test Double, a software consultancy. Joel shares how his team stays connected across distance, how they build feedback into everyday work, and how they support each other through uncertainty.

Hi everybody, this is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, ranked #20 in the top 100 podcasts in social sciences. Giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement, experience, and satisfaction since 2017. I'm Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator with expertise in communication and education. I'm here to dig into some of what we might take for granted about communication in our professional lives. If you want to strengthen the work you can do in your professional sphere, this is a place for you because communication touches everything. We're here to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make. If you value this show, the stories and inspiration and research, I've got good news: i can help your organization. Visit H-CPartners.com or connect with me on Linked.

Today's episode is a little different I hope you'll think in a good way. For the first time in over 200 episodes, I'm talking with someone outside of the health sector. Joel is from Test Double, and they are a remote software consultancy. They're dealing with a lot of the same challenges many of us face: how to keep teams connected, how to give feedback that actually helps, and how to navigate big changes like remote work and AI.

Now, I worked with Joel and his team almost three years ago to help them build a stronger feedback culture. And it's been really great to hear how those tools are still making a difference for them. So if you're wrestling with communication issues or trying to lead your team through change, there's a lot here for you and I can help your organization just like I helped Test Double. Visit Health Communication Partners dot com and click contact, or find me on linked.  Here's Joel!

I’m live Via Zoom with Joel Helbling. Joel is an engagement partner at Test Double, which offers comprehensive software and product management consulting services. Joel, welcome to the show.

Hi, Anne Marie, it’s great to be here.

I’m really glad to have you here. And I’m glad to have a chance for our listeners to learn from somebody who is not themselves in the health sector. You work at Test Double. So can you tell us a little bit about what you do as an engagement partner?

Sure. So as an engagement partner, I’m responsible for supporting all of our consultants at a particular client. There are a number of clients that I support.  That support takes the form of meeting with them one-on-one coaching and mentoring and as well as any and all of the little logistical things that may come up in the course of their engagement with a client.

Well, thanks for that, Joel, and that helps us understand, you know, why are we here talking about communication at work? So you have a lot of workplace communication that’s going on. What is an issue or problem you’re facing related to interprofessional communication?

Well, I’d say probably the biggest structural challenge we have around communication is the fact that we are, and have always been, a 100% remote company. And so everybody that works with our clients actually works with the client people a lot more than they work with us by default. And so we’ve found that we need to be very deliberate in terms of our approach to communication. Because we don’t get a lot of the things that you get for free when everybody goes to the same office and works together during the day.

And we just started touching on this at an earlier episode that my brother was on, what does it mean to be an all-remote worker? The kinds of conversations that you have around the water cooler that we used to all be able to take for granted you don’t have now. You jump on a call and that’s it.

Yeah.

You don’t have the relationship necessarily that happens before a meeting. So how are you–

Well, I was gonna say it really brings home what you leave on the table with that. You become very aware of all of the things that grow up out of those incidental conversations when you meet people randomly throughout the day. So yeah, we’ve had to have a very deliberate and thoughtful approach to trying to restore some of that, those kinds of incidental communication patterns.

So tell me more, man–you’re going exactly where I was hoping I would. How are you facing this issue or problem of communication among colleagues who just don’t get to see each other’s work and talk to each other about their work as much as they would like to?

Sure. Well, luckily, all of our folks seem to love interacting and talking with each other. We do a number of things, schedule random coffee times. We have larger groups that meet together for sort of a brunch style conversation. And we schedule these things randomly just to try to stir things up. We’ve also had initiatives like what we call homerooms where the same group of people will meet together on a regular basis. And then here in the last, what’s it been a year or two, since you came and worked with us?

It’s almost three years now.

Is it? You're kidding me!

It is! I’m not!

Yeah, so you helped us with implementing an approach to feedback. And again, for us, this was a very deliberate attempt at trying to bring more feedback into the way that we work. Which fundamentally involves getting more insight into what each other, what people were doing. That's something that we really lack. And so I’d say that one of the big things that you helped us with was just in terms of our approach, and ways of communicating feedback, really excellent stuff. And from what I have seen and experienced, those things  really stuck. And people have carried those forward into their ways of interacting and talking with each other.

Thanks so much for that Joel. That really means a lot to me. Gosh. What are learning from doing  feedback the way you all do it. I mean, you definitely have these other intentional ways of communicating with each other, even though you are not the client, right? This is communicating with your colleagues. What are you all learning?

Well, one thing we’re learning is that it’s hard to do.

Mmhmm.

It’s challenging. I think at the same time, even when you were consulting and coaching with us, what we realized is there are certain kinds of feedback that we are getting all of the time. We really favor, for instance, pair programming, where you have two people working on the same bit of code at the same time in a very collaborative way. And of course, in that kind of an environment, you get immediate feedback right in the moment, very contextualized to the work at hand. So that’s great. We also submit our work in sort of small sub projects called merge requests or a pull request. And those are basically an artifact that others can look at and comment, and sometimes in some environments have to provide an approval for. And so that’s another form of feedback that’s kind of built into the work. But I think especially as regards questions like how am I doing in my career? Am I on the right track? Are there things that I should be thinking about in terms of the way that I want to grow? Those don’t come up as naturally in the course of day-to-day work, so

The big ones.

Those are some of the things, yeah, that we focus on.

So what are your next steps with folks? Because you’re in an industry that’s going through some enormous change right now with AI.

True.

Do you want to tell or do you want to give people advice if they’re in the same situation or similar situation? Working remotely and not really having the opportunities to grapple with the big questions, the heavy questions: How am I doing? Where do I go next? What does all this change mean for me?

Sure. I think that for us, the challenge has been ensuring that we’ve moved beyond being just a consultancy that deploys individuals out to various different clients to operate as individuals, essentially sole operators, and making the shift to deploying as a concerted team. And that means we have to have better awareness of what other people in the same engagement are thinking about and seeing. And we have to find ways to solve problems together and /or how to communicate problems that we’re seeing with the client. And so one of the things that we’re doing lately is shifting to kind of moving this feedback group idea that you worked with us about, closer to the work that we’re doing as consultants. So we envision having small groups of people at a particular client as closely related to the same workstream as it’s possible. That’ll vary, you know, because we have a wide variety of engagements, different numbers of people. Sometimes everybody working on one team, sometimes people scattered across the whole engagement. But the idea is for folks to be able to meet together on a regular basis, talk about the work and the things that they’re encountering in the course of their work. And kind of share ideas and solicit feedback on the approaches that they’re taking. And you mentioned AI. I think that that is an example of the kind of tumultuous change on the horizon within our industry, certainly.

Hmm.

You have AI company CEOs out there prognosticating that by the end of the year, all code will be written by AI. So there’s a range of rather troubling, exciting statements!

Right. There must be. I mean, gosh, how does it to be in an environment like this? And how are you helping your colleagues?

Sure, well, that again is where collaboration and working together comes into it. I think we have a very vibrant community around AI coding tools, for example. Where people are conducting experiments and sharing them and helping each other improve the results that they’re getting. So we’re really trying to lean into feedback as a means to help our people to weather sort of career–I don’t wanna say threatening ’cause I think there’s as much opportunity there as there is a threat, honestly–but very significant developments within our industry and we’re seeking to do that in a collaborative way that leverages feedback.

Joel Helbling from Test Double. Thank you so much for coming to the show today.

My pleasure. Thank you, Anne Marie.

Thanks again to Joel Helbling from Test Double. I helped Joel and his colleagues design a feedback system that still shapes how they work and grow together today. If you’re facing similar challenges supporting staff through change, building stronger feedback practices, or creating a more connected culture I'd love to help your team the way I helped his. Visit health communication partners dot com and click on contact.

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Communicating across our differences is difficult, but necessary, in today’s highly polarized environment. I share real life examples, and advice from a language expert, as encouragement for  talking to someone you disagree with.

Communicating with people that we disagree with has never been easy, but today I’m arguing it’s pretty necessary. So I’m going to share some ideas and inspiration and yeah, some examples, of what it’s like to communicate across significant differences.

Hi everybody. This is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, ranked number 20 in the Top 100 Podcasts in Social Sciences. Giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement, experience, and satisfaction since 2017. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator with expertise in communication and education. I’m here to dig into some of what we might take for granted about communication in our professional lives. If you want to strengthen the work you can do in your professional sphere, this is a place for you because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make. If you value this show, the stories and inspiration and research, I’ve got good news: I can help your organization. Visit healthcommunicationpartners.com, click on contact, or you can connect with me on LinkedIn.

So talking about communication in today’s times is tough. The more divisive I feel like the rhetoric becomes, the more important it is for us to connect, and reject those ideas of division. This is hard work in our communication. I read a quote recently from an article I’ll share, and the author said, “In our own small sphere of moments, we are a force for promoting a more compassionate and humanized world.”

And so in today’s episode, I want to share a couple examples of folks who are doing the hard work of talking across difference, in case it can give you some ideas and some inspiration for the next time you have to have a difficult conversation. Whether it’s someone at home, someone at work, or someone when you’re just out there, living your life. 

First I want to share some podcast love with a newer show called “Why Should I Trust You?” This series drops weekly but I want to draw your attention to two episodes I’m going to go ahead and link in the show notes, that are conversations between MAHA grassroots folks and public health leaders. So there’s two episodes Part 1 and Part 2. I’m going to go ahead and link to both of those in the notes.

Another example I want to share is a show that wrapped several years ago, in pre -COVID times, but it was very, I think it was fun then, but it’s very relevant now, and it’s called “Conversations with People Who Hate Me.” From the website: “Don’t be fooled by the title. It’s actually a loving show that fosters unlikely connections in an age of increasing digital isolation.” And again, I think it bears repeating now in today’s very divided world.

And now I wanna share something from a researcher and linguist that I reference quite a lot on this show: Jim Gee. I had read a passage from one of his books for an episode about two years ago that turned out to be a very popular episode. A listener had asked for a reflection to start a meeting, and that’s why I shared this passage from Gee. But in light of how things are now, I think it’s good for, it could be good for us to just read these words to ourselves. And maybe get encouraged, maybe reframe things a little bit, and take hope. Here’s that passage.

Alright now I'm reading this out of an actual book, so you'll hear the paper. Here we go:

Human communication, especially across social and cultural divides, is a very difficult matter. We humans are very good at finding meaning. We find it all over the place, even in the stars, with many people still believing in the medieval art of astrology. In fact, we are so good at finding meaning that we very often run off too quickly with interpretations of what other people mean that are based on our own social and cultural worlds, not theirs. Too often we are wrong in ways that are hurtful.

When we sit back and reflect on what people have said and written a luxury we have too little in life, but the basis of discourse analysis we often discover better, deeper, and more humane interpretations. The small child whom the teacher assumed made no sense at sharing time looks a lot smarter after a little reflection . A person from a different race, class, or culture looks, on reflection, if the reflection is based on any knowledge, to have made both a better point and a better impression on second thought than on first.

We believe it is a matter of competence to re-read a good book or re-watch a great movie to get more out of it. But we rarely apply the same principle to our fellow citizens . Indeed, writing a second time as in the case of this book is just a way to be in dialog with ourselves, to think more deeply about what we mean and how others will interpret us. In a world in which people rush off to kill those who don't agree with them and countries rush off to war, it may be a matter of survival that we learn to base our views and actions on second (and more) hearings and readings of others and second sayings and writings by ourselves.

Even after we have re-heard or re-read, we may still disagree with people. And they may have had good or bad motives. But we humans, when it comes to using language to make sense, are very good indeed. Whether we are telling the truth or lying, we build intricate, complex, and highly patterned oral and written texts with which to accomplish our goals. We are creatures of language. Evolution has seen to that.

Thus, we can say that there is an imbalance in human communication: each human being creates complex meanings in language, but each of us is so good at finding meanings that we are often too quick to attribute meanings to others that are rooted more in our own cultures, identities, and fears than they are on a close inspection of what the other person has said or written.

So a second listening or a second reading is, in many cases, a matter of competence (what we need to do to be competent in our areas of work) and, in many cases, too, a matter of ethics (if we want to be fair) . The task is this: to think more deeply about the meanings we give people's words so as to make ourselves better, more humane people and the world a better, more humane place. While we still may disagree with others after reflection, we will, nonetheless, be in a position to be a much better critic, to represent what we believe in a much better way. But we may also sometimes change our own viewpoints to be more positively inclined toward others than we were initially. We will then, too, be better placed to cooperate with them in human endeavors, especially in a fast-changing, global, culturally diverse (and often dangerous) world.

Thanks to Jim Gee for that. Now I have some questions for you to consider:

If you appreciate this approach to communication and reflection, you'll love my course Foundations of Equitable Communication in Health. Learn more at healthcommunicationpartners.com. This has been 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. Audio engineering by Joe Liebel, music by Joe Liebel and Alexis R.

The post Inspiration for communicating across difference appeared first on Health Communication Partners.

Competition and collaboration are sometimes thought of as opposites. I’ll share one thing people can do to help collaborations go better even when there’s competitors in the room.

Collaborations have always been popular, but it’s possible today they’re getting more common and that the stakes may be getting higher. So in today’s episode, I’m gonna give you one thing you can do to increase the quality of any collaboration that you are leading or a part of.

Hi, everybody. This is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, ranked number 20 of the Top 100 Podcasts in Social Sciences. Giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement, experience, and satisfaction since 2017. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator with expertise in communication and education. I’m here to dig into some of what we might take for granted about communication in our professional lives. If you want to strengthen the work you can do in your professional sphere, this is the place for you because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn, get inspired, and, most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make.

Did you know I work with business? Better communication is an investment that makes your business more efficient because there’s less time lost to misunderstandings. And when there’s better communication between groups, things get done with less must and fuss! So to get there, contact me through LinkedIn or visit healthcommunicationpartners.com and click on contact.

And if you’re in California or your organization has a presence in California, please get in touch with me. We’re proud to offer services as an approved vendor for technical assistance by the state of California for the PATH TA marketplace. This is a unique opportunity to receive free technical assistance for CalAIM implementation to support enhanced care management efforts. So again, Find me on linked visit healthcommunicationpartners.com and click on contact because time is of the essence here folks

And like I said, we’re big fans of collaboration. When we co-design and co develop projects, we know we get improved decision-making and quality and applicability of the project. We also get richer more robust end products. We all want to make something good. Now people are collaborating, perhaps more out of necessity. I just had a client this month say to me, “Everyone’s gonna have to do more with less and be working more together.”

So as we all carry on and find ways to continue doing the work we’re doing, collaborations are a powerful tool when done right. I’m gonna share some stories from my experience for the next collaboration you’re in or in charge of.

And again, like the rest of this series, I’m basing this on research from the University of Pennsylvania. Yes, collaborations are the topic of much research because you can’t just put people in the same space, virtual or physical, and say “work together” and call it a collaboration. There are structured, disciplined ways to design and lead collaborations. This includes managing the challenges of collaboration, which you know is important.

And I want to give a shout out here to Samantha Cinnick, who came and did a mini series with me on communication in public health, and one of her episodes was on communication in a new collaboration, so I’m going to drop that in the show notes.

There are many ways collaborations can go wrong. When that happens, quality suffers, people’s willingness to participate might be affected. So here’s one thing people can do to help collaborations go better, make sure everyone still gets their job done, and finds the collaboration worthwhile.

One challenge of collaborations that I don’t think gets talked about enough, maybe because it’s seen as the opposite of collaboration, is competition. Competition and collaboration are sometimes thought of as contrary to each other, but I’m going to take a closer look at that.

Because no matter how good someone’s intentions are for joining a collaboration, we’re all still carrying our organization’s expectations and priorities and constraints along with us into the collaboration. We still have our regular job to do. We still have rivals and competitors who are trying to jump through the same hoops we are. And some of those organizations or people might be in the collaboration with us.

This is a reality maybe people are reluctant to talk about. And one of the reasons might be they’re afraid that they’d shatter the collaboration or damage whatever coalition they’re hoping to build. But I’ll argue that talking about competition, fronting the fact that it’s there, can have the opposite effect. It can strengthen your collaboration. But I get that talking about this can still feel risky. So I’m going to give you a place to start on talking about competition and collaboration, or a way to strengthen your approach if you’re already there.

Here’s one question you want to make sure you’re asking and getting good answers to: In what ways are these collaborators also competitors?

In what ways are these collaborators also competitors? I want you to take a moment with this question. Answer it. Get lots of answers to it. Answer it well. Talk to people. Get in there. Be practical.

You want to make sure you’re designing or having a collaboration that doesn’t ignore the potentially uncomfortable reality that there’s competition in the room, but acknowledge it. We all know it’s very competitive out there, even though our collaborations seek unity. We want a group working as one on a common project. So get good answers to that question.

There’s two reasons why you’ll wanna know what those answers are. One is because you wanna know what not to ask people to do or to talk about in the collaboration. Second, you want to be able to be super smart about what you are asking people to do or what you are talking about, so that the collaboration can be a win-win even among competitors.

Let me give you some examples. A colleague who was heading up a large project to increase broadband access in rural areas told me a great story about the start of this project that had all sorts of stakeholders. Many internet service providers, big household names and little mom-and-pop companies. And leadership at first said, “Let’s get them all other, put them in a room. And my colleague had been leading collaborations for long enough to know that would be a disaster.

Yes, people would come, and yes, people would be polite. But there would be crickets around the table when it came time to talk. Because folks were all competitors, and would fear letting something slip about their operations or their plans or anything proprietary. Even though everyone in the room totally supported the project, and was very excited to be a part of it, it would have been an awkward and likely unproductive meeting because people would be guarding what they said, for understandable reasons. So thinking about competition can help you be careful about what you’re expecting people to talk about in a collaboration.

From my own experience as a consultant, I have a couple of stories too. A large organization asked for my assistance on a collaboration with many and varied stakeholders. And the leadership wanted everyone to work together. It was clear to me that there was significant competition among the participants that we needed to address.

One of the participants said to me, “Leadership wants groups working together for a unified thing. That’s wonderful. We should all aspire to that. We need to be cognizant of that. There are times when it’s appropriate, but sometimes it’s more difficult than others. We’re collaborators, but we want to win. We started this. We want our stakeholders to know we’re taking the lead.

I felt it was important for the leadership and the organization to know this and adjust accordingly, So it could make sure the collaboration was relevant and worthwhile and connected to the real -world practicalities of the participants. And that’s what I helped them do.

But it can be hard to remember or kind of keep front of mind that there is competition because our collaborations are often complicated. We’re working on big problems. Often there’s a lot at stake. So we’re kind of thinking about other things. A federal government client had asked for my help with a collaboration. And again I was reminding the team, there’s a lot of competition in the room.

Now, people were there because they cared very deeply about the issues and the project. And they still have jobs, they still have goals and priorities. So I helped the client make sure the collaboration had value to the participants beyond the collaboration itself.

Again, I want to share with you that question: In what ways are these collaborators also competitors? You could also ask, “In what ways may they be in competition?” And we’re asking this not because collaborations can’t take the heat, but because they can. And in order to succeed, they have to.

If your organization would like help with collaboration, contact me. You can visit healthcommunicationpartners.com and click on contact. You can message me on LinkedIn or you can email me info @h-cpartners dot com. That’s I -N -F -O at h-cpartners dot com. This has been “10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication” from Health Communication Partners. Audio Engineering and Music by Joe Liebel. Additional Music from Alexis Rounds. Thanks for listening to “10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication” from Health Communication Partners LLC. Find us at healthcommunicationpartners .com

The post “We’re collaborators, but we want to win.” Managing competition in collaborations appeared first on Health Communication Partners.

I am live in person with Dr. Saria Saccocio. Dr. Sacocio is the Chief Medical Officer at Essence Healthcare and a board -certified family physician. Dr. Saccocio, welcome back to the show. 

Anne Marie, it’s so good to see you, to connect with you, and have a conversation today. 

I’m really excited about this because you are a communication champion, you’re a health equity champion, so I’m really eager to get into the four questions that I ask all my guests. Dr. Saccocio, what is an issue or a problem in communication in health care that you’re facing these days? 

Well, what I’m experiencing, I don’t believe is so personalized to health care. In fact, I believe across the entire workspace, or even in our own household: Chaos ensues. And the challenge is, how do we take a chaotic world and create sanity around it? That is the challenge today and it’s not going away.

It’s a massive challenge. You’re speaking to a lot of people right now. You’re right. So how are you facing this challenge?

Sometimes with challenge myself–and I say that because I am an eternal longitudinal learner–no one has got it all figured out, Anne Marie. Nope. And sometimes I forget what I know. 

Legit. 

And so I’m focusing on two things to manage this chaotic space.With healthcare, as we talked about just a moment ago, the bar is raised. The challenges change. And with the change in the challenge, so comes the chaos that we can contribute to, or we can help manage. So the two things are: one, I’m in charge of my own destiny! And so what I mean by that is, what I recognize is, that I set the road map for me. We all have a manager. We all have rules to follow, but I had to turn on the light bulb and say, “Hmm, am I waiting for someone to create my space in the roadmap?” And I realized, “No, this is my roadmap to create.” Whether you’re the leader or you work for a manager, you have an opportunity to set the example and to create a world the way that you’d like to see it. So set your structure. Set your organization. 

Not waiting for permission. I love that. Not waiting for someone to say, “Okay, do this.” I love that.

Well, and being a manager myself, and having a supervisor, this is refreshing when people demonstrate and they skate to the puck and already solve for their problems. Yes! And for my supervisor, remember, he benefits from the same thing. So how do I create that world where I have the roadmap in place and I show up in my space and demonstrate and model myself? 

I love this. I love this. So you said two things. What is the second thing? 

Yes. And the number two, find your best friend forever at work. 

Ooh. Tell me about this. I love this. 

Who is your BFF? Find a BFF. Press Ganey, an organization that focuses on employee satisfaction, retention, and engagement, says that one of the key factors is having a BFF at work. And so who is that person? Who do you have a safe space with? Who raises you up rather than keeping you where you are? That’s critical too. 

I love this idea of “do you have a BFF?” If you do, this is a time to tap into them. If you don’t, this is a time to warm up to somebody and have that conversation that maybe you’ve been avoiding having. Or there is a potential friendship there, there is a potential collaborator there, that you haven’t reached out to yet. Maybe this is the time, so that you can help yourself manage this enormous amount of change that we’re all under right now. So Dr. Saccocio, what are you learning from this? What are you learning from charting your own path, not waiting for permission or somebody to create the piece for you? What are you learning from reaching out to your BFFs? 

Well, here’s what I’ve learned. Anne -Marie, I’ve had a BFF at work in the last several organizations I worked in because I clued into, “That’s healthy for me.” And let’s flip the coin. Is it healthy for them also. Be a good BFF. And that’s what I’ve also learned. Don’t find someone who drags you down or commiserates with everything you say. You need a moment, and a safe space for that reaction, response, and then raise them up. So that they raise you up. So what do I mean by that? Let’s say you had a rotten day at work. get it out, say it, move on. But the expectation I challenge you to set for and what I’ve learned myself is not to stay there. The purpose is not to vent. We do a lot of venting. venting is good. It can be healthy. What do you want to get out of the vent, and what’s the direction forward? Lean on your BFF to help guide you, and for you to guide them to a level up. to above the line. So here’s one thing. There’s this book that I follow, The 15 Conscious Commitments of Leadership by Jim Dethmer and crew [Diana Chapman and Kaley Klemp]. And every time I read it, Anne Marie, I pick up something else. It’s staying above the line and help your BFF to stay above the line too. 

I love that, the important pivot that our friends can help us make. We’ve got to be intentional about it: going from venting to turning to action. So what are next steps for you as a leader? Where do you want to go in this moment?

And what I’ve learned in this moment, is that I continue to practice, practice, practice, practice. We are in a state of chaos and change, and you have control over your own behaviors, and how you show up at work. Do not set it and forget it because as the world changes, we must evolve with it. Practice, practice, practice. 

I love this. Dr. Saria Saccocio, Chief Medical Officer at Essence Healthcare. Thank you for being on the show today. Thank you for coming back. Thank you for being the kind of leader that we need right now. 

And it is so fun and it’s so fun to do it together with you, Anne Marie.

Thanks so much, Saria.

The post Dr. Saria Saccocio shares 2 steps to find your way out of chaos appeared first on Health Communication Partners.

It’s our 200th episode! Today you’ll hear a familiar voice tell a story about how emotional intelligence helped communication in the workplace.

Today’s episode is our 200th episode! And today you’ll be hearing about emotional intelligence in the workplace from someone I think you’ve heard before. Hi, everybody. This is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, ranked number 20 in the top 100 podcasts in Social Sciences. Giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement experience and satisfaction since 2017. That’s right, we’re in our eighth year. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator with expertise in communication and education. I’m here to dig into some of what we might take for granted about communication in our professional lives. If you want to strengthen the work you can do in your professional sphere, this is a place for you, because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make.

And at 200 episodes, I just want to say thank you! Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for telling your friends. Thanks for being in touch. Thank you for downloading. Because literally, it is you that we’re doing this for. It’s your questions and your engagement that really have kept us going for 200 episodes. I had no idea it was going to last like this, and it was going to continue to have this kind of energy and engagement. Because most shows plateau, and we just haven’t. We still have those days, just randomly able to get 1,000 downloads, which is nuts! Especially for a show that’s this niche! So again, thank you so much, and I want to say thank you to all of our guests, including the guest who’s on mic with me right now who is also our audio engineer and my brother Joe Liebel.  Joe it’s great being on mic with you congratulations for 200 episodes

Hey Anne Marie, good to be here with you. And yeah, congratulations on episode 200. It’s been an exciting journey to go with you from the ideation of this podcast through to where we are now and to see the series evolve.

– And it really has evolved, hasn’t it? ‘Cause it started out with patient physician communication specifically, and that’s why the title is what it is. And then it became kind of patient/provider communication. And then with, I think team -based communication and healthcare, we got into more interprofessional communication. And then when it broadened to public health, public health really brought in some questions about multi -sector communication, right? Because there are always, public health is always having to bring various folks cross sector work together. And all of us are working in our workplaces. So I think that’s the kind of inter-professional has become a bigger part of the show.

Because this show is based on what people ask about. And the work that I do as a consultant, the trends that I see as a researcher, the conversations that I’m a part of, and the things that people just write and ask me about. So if you haven’t been in touch yet with questions that you have, go ahead and go to healthcommunicationpartners .com, click on contact. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can also write me an old -fashioned email. Now we’re at more of a kind of work communication focus at both individual and systems levels, whatever your work is. But obviously we’re going to tend a little bit more to the health sector. So it’s really a holistic look at work communication.

And I’ve been thinking about, should we update the name of the series to reflect this focus? I am genuinely not sure. So if you have thoughts on this, please let me know. But here we are at episode 200. And I know, Joe, you and I have been on mic a handful of times

– Throughout the years, we have.

– Yeah, so for this I thought I’m gonna do something that we haven’t done and I really want to turn the show over to you and I thought I could you know find out what you want to talk about because you’re in the health sector as well right you’re in health IT.

– Yeah so I work for a software company that provides software services and data to life sciences clients and health IT related services. So when you had reached out about opening up this topic for this special episode, this landmark episode, I was actually going through some challenging stuff at the time in my professional life. And I was managing a difficult project with an upset client. And amid all this, I felt like I was being bombarded daily, as probably a lot of us have felt, with news at a national and global level, that was really finding that to be distressing and stressful.

Amid all this, an email comes in from our company CEO and founder. Now he does this regularly on like a Sunday afternoon, Sunday evening, send out a company email, talk about topics that he feels are relevant across the company. Sometimes our vision and value, sometimes current events. And that was really what this one was about. And it cast a spotlight on what a lot of us have been feeling in our, in our life, kind of at the national news level, let’s just say, and the stressors coming from that, and how that might be impacting our industry, our clients and our personal lives.  And gave some guidance on how to cope with that. So that in turn made me look back at all of these challenges I was going through, in work and in life, and it kind of pointed me to a topic that I learned about several years back, and then I thought, let’s turn to this.

– That's great, you’re absolutely, you’re answering the first question, which is what’s the issue that you’re facing? And so what I’m hearing from you is the kind of stressor on stressors, right? We’ve got our own lives that are going on. And then we’ve got the kind of the wrapping of the national kind of tension and stress that’s definitely been heightened lately. And that’s got to affect our communication at work. It’s got to affect our communication at home, right?

– Absolutely.

– And so how are you–the second question that I ask all of my guests, I get to ask you–how are you dealing with the stress on your communication?

– Yeah, so the thing that I had turned to and went back to explore a little bit further, is the topic of emotional intelligence and resilience. And how that can help us simply take pause, take a breath, assess and reflect on all the individual stressors that seem to kind of compound each other. And then build up resilience in the capacity that we have to respond with a cool head, and choosing a path that serves us best. That’s not reactive, it’s not a fight or flight reaction, but it’s more of a strategically thought of, cool -headed approach to the individual stressors. And how to kind of peel them away and deal with them potentially in different ways so that we can have focus and clarity.

– And thanks for that. You’re already teeing up like, what my next question is, what are you learning from thinking about emotional intelligence when it comes to your communication. ‘Cause I’m already hearing you say things like, that I love about this show, which is reflective practice. That you’re already– emotional intelligence works well with reflective practice, right? Because it gives us some tools to stop and pause. It gives us ways to kind of parse out what we’re seeing, what we’re hearing, what’s running through our heads, what we’re encountering in our professional realm. So what are you learning from taking emotional intelligence as a concept or as a set of tools to help you as a communicator at work.

– Yeah. So just to give you some context, I am mostly a remote worker. So meeting with my clients over Zoom or other remote tools. And one of the things that emotional intelligence at least helps me to do is to take a step back and assess and reframe the situation. This case, a project through a series of issues and failures was not tracking the schedule, clients upset. And so like, how do you deal with that? Well, first you have to deal with it. You can’t just avoid it, ’cause then things will get worse. But we may have a tendency to do that. So You have to take it head on. You take it head on, you don’t want to be combative, you know, the fight part that we might feel like we have to charge into something. But when you think about: everybody’s remote, you get into a meeting together and there you are. You have no casual interaction context, generally not co-located or anything like that. So you really have to prep yourself for these interactions.

– That’s really, that’s true. Thanks for saying that, you know, as you’re saying it, it’s occurring to me. Yeah, we don’t talk enough about how much it’s, I don’t know if it’s harder. I don’t think it’s necessarily any easier to do work communication when you’re fully remote or even mostly remote. So thanks for bringing that up man. No, go ahead.

– Yeah, and in that sense, you don’t have the same opportunities you do in person to necessarily build and foster a relationship with your coworkers even, with your other remote coworkers. So team cohesion, you’re just kind of thrown into those meetings together. And that makes it particularly challenging. And so emotional intelligence has taught me to say: okay, take a moment, take a breath, realize, peel part the things you’re stressed out about. Maybe it’s not the best that I listen to national news in the morning right before going into a meeting.

– Legit

– You know what I mean? Just have a little bit of clarity, some mindfulness. And then approach things with a cool head. Realize that your customers, in this case, these were customers on the other side of the Atlantic. So they might not have been having the best day. They might not be seeing me in the best light right now. So how to empathize with them. And then try to repair a relationship so that you’re working together as a team.

– What I really like about what I’m hearing too, is the sense of grasping the agency that we have, grasping the power that we have, which is over our own communication. Which is over how we respond in the moment, right? And not letting all of these multiple stressors just have their way with us and take us away from our intentions. But coming back, like you were saying, just pause. Taking a breath, and kind of regaining control over one of the few things in this life we do have control over. And that’s our communication. So what’s next for you, man, when you’re thinking about emotional intelligence and communication at work?

– Yeah, so I didn’t mention how I always really learned about emotional intelligence in the first place.

– Oh, right. What’s that story?

– My previous job, going back about eight years, when I was new there, I threw my hat in the ring for when they needed people to help build out their self -paced training, their recorded training assets, which were mostly technical training and data and technology and so forth. But one of the assignments that they gave to me was on recording training on emotional intelligence. It was like emotional intelligence 101. I was like, “Oh, what is this? It’s not technical.” I was really curious. So I not only recorded that, but I kind of internalized the content. And it made me think, why is this company that’s mostly like a tech data services company, why are they pointing their people towards this kind of training? It’s a soft skill, it’s an interpersonal skill, but it must be something of value. And I’ve become a strong believer that it is. So, you know, that was when I was introduced to it about eight years ago.

And so what I want to do is that my current job is really, you know, evangelize this to my colleagues. Whether we are external client -facing or not, we all have customers, we all have colleagues. And emotional intelligence can play a role in those relationships, in those communications. And even at home too, you’re going to terrible day at work, when you’re going to deal with your people at home. And it can still help to center you and give you, you know, peel back those stressors, and then make decisions that you’re comfortable with in the long term in your communications.

– I love this. Thanks so much, Joe. And what I’ll do is I won’t put you on the spot now, but maybe if you can find if there’s been articles or books on emotional intelligence videos that have been helpful for you, and you want to share them with me before we go ahead and post this out, I’ll put the links in the show notes [below] for folks who want to take a look at emotional intelligence for their communication.

– Absolutely. I have some things to share it for sure.

– Awesome. Awesome. Well, it’s been a treat having you on the mic, man. Congratulations again for 200 episodes. Holy schmoly. And thank you again to our audience for listening. This has been 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners with Anne Marie and Joe Liebel today.

– Yay, episode 200!

– Woohoo!

Book references: 

Optimal : how to sustain personal and organizational excellence every day

by Goleman, Daniel, author.

Publisher, Date: New York, NY : Harper Business, and imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, [2023]

Fierce resilience : combating workplace stress one conversation at a time

by Beltran, Edward, author.

Edition: [Trade paperback edition].

Publisher, Date: Oakland, CA : BK Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., [2024] 

Web reference: https://www.theotherkindofsmart.com/ei-quiz

The post Joe Liebel on Emotional Intelligence and workplace communication appeared first on Health Communication Partners.

Dr. Schiavo shares powerful stories about communication’s role in community engagement and pursuing health equity.

We’re shining a light on public health and the value of the work done by public health professionals. Today you’ll hear from Dr. Renata Schiavo, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Communication in Healthcare. 

Hi everybody, this is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, ranked #20 in the top 100 podcasts in social sciences. Giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement, experience, and satisfaction since 2017. I'm Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator with expertise in communication and education. I'm here to dig into some of what we might take for granted about communication in our professional lives. If you want to strengthen the work you can do in your professional sphere, this is a place for you because communication touches everything. We're here to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make.

And I don’t know if you’re keeping track, but we’re at almost 200 episodes! Our next episode is gonna be #200 so don’t miss that one!

I have a special message for our listeners in California. If your’re in California and your organization works with Medi-CAL’s CalAIM I have good news for you!

Health Communication Partners LLC is now a state-approved vendor on the California PATH Technical Assistance (TA) Marketplace. What does this mean? It means your organization can work with HCP for free, that’s right, no cost to you, to support enhanced care management (ECM) efforts as part of CalAIM. We specialize in Promoting Health Equity and Supporting Cross-Sector Partnerships. So if you work for an organization involved in CalAIM implementation, get in touch with me on Linked or visit HCP and click on contact.

Today I’m returning to an interview w. Dr. Renata Schiavo, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Communication in Healthcare and Senior Lecturer at Columbia University. We did this interview during COVID, and she’ll be coming back to the show soon, so keep your ears peeled for her. Her advice on community engagement and pursuinng health equity is as relevant and inspirational now as it was then. Here’s Dr. Schiavo. 

Thank you for inviting me.

So Dr. Schiavo is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health. She's the Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed Journal of Communication in Healthcare: Strategies, Media and Engagement in Global Health. And is also the Founder and President, and on the Board of Directors, of the Health Equity Initiative, which is a member-driven, nonprofit membership organization. Dr. Schiavo can you tell us a little bit about the Health Equity initiative that you founded?

Thank you Anne Marie. My passion has been always with working with under-served, marginalized, vulnerable populations, both in the US and other countries. So Health Equity Initiative is founded on the principle that we need so many different people so many different sectors, so many different communities to get engaged in addressing the social determinants of health. And so we focus on championing transformative change to advance health equity. We support knowledge, we engage community leaders, and build capacity to address the barriers that prevent people from living a healthy and productive life.  Health Equity Initiative advocates for improving condition(s) and achieving equity in health for all.

Thank you for that. That's, that's a remarkable reach that the organization has. And you're already hinting at some of where I'm going with my next question, because you're someone who works on health equity in and beyond the health sector at multiple levels. So: what is a problem that is really front of mind for you, that you are trying to address, that's related to health communication?

So in this moment and also throughout my career, we have been reminded about the impact of social discrimination. whether it's racism or other forms of discrimination, just like against the  LGBTQI Community, or against people from low-income settings, or immigrants, or others. So with I think that both COVID-19 and the recent episodes of police brutality against the Black community have demonstrated the importance of addressing social discrimination in our communities as a key determinant of a lot of health and social inequities we see. And I feel that communication, with its focus on building bridges, creating partnerships, empowering people, has a key role in addressing social discrimination.

Thank you for that. And I'm wondering in the multiple leadership roles that you hold, how are you doing some of this work? How are you doing some of this bridge building? What does that, does that look like in your career? What does that mean to you now?

My main concern is that lots of the work we do in health communication continues to be a bit top-down. And we really need to bring in the voice of communities, and use participatory and human-centered design solution(s) to approach so many of these inequities that our communities experience. So it's important to listen to their concerns or their issues, their needs, their priorities and develop solutions with them. And so this is an approach that is by far more common in economically developing nations such as the countries where I work. I work in Rwanda, Angola and Brazil. And so community consultation, community dialogue, tends to be approaches that are more used in a lot of those countries. And also here in the US we are seeing a lot of, you know, increased interest in community dialogue and engagement. So there's a lot to learn from these experiences from developing countries, and the importance of coming together as a community, and really raising the voice of community leaders.

So it sounds like you're using some of your experiences in Rwanda, Angola, Brazil and and seeing some traction here for the community-driven approaches in the US. How does that emerge, or does that emerge in your work with the Journal of Communication in Healthcare?

So I think that there are different ways that through the Journal that we are trying to basically advocate for these themes to be integrated in health communication. One of them is through editorials, both by myself and other members of our editorial board. And the other one is through calls for papers that highlight the importance of a community-driven approaches to communication. And also other initiatives that may bring in the voices of patients and community leaders within the materials we receive and publish.

What are you learning from going about this community- driven approach? What are you learning looking back at your career right now that might be helpful in this moment?

So first of all, it is possible to do this. that's one important lessons learned.' And in fact, you mentioned before the Health Equity Initiative we worked with the Office of Minority Health Resource Center, the HHS Office of Minority Health, on a consultative process with community leaders, with local academia, with local community centers and a variety of other stakeholders to develop Task Forces for infant mortality prevention here in the United States, in cities where there are high rates of infant mortality. There are some reluctance to do that. Because sometimes people may feel that there is a lot of time invested in participatory planning processes. But actually, the time that we may save up front we waste at the end, because the solution we may design may not be meeting the needs and priorities of our communities. And also, if we design a communication intervention with communities, we also recognize the expert in their needs and priorities. And so one of the main themes in my work has been that we need to recognize the expert in everyone. And while we may be, y'know, trained in Public Health or we may be trained in health communication, the communities are really the expert in their needs and priorities. And also this reduces the chance for any kind of bias and discrimination that we may bring in an intervention that had been designed without the input from community leaders in the communities that they are intended for.

Such a powerful set of statements too: what happens when you begin with the communities that you are trying to serve? You save time because you haven't made an intervention that is irrelevant to them because they have been informing it all along. You help eliminate bias because it's their values and their languages that are informing the processes. And you you build a different kind of relationship when you treat people as experts in their own situations and in their own lives. thank you for that! thank you for all of that. what do you see as your next steps as leader, a researcher, an editor-in-chief, a citizen?

I feel that things are starting to move in the right direction. So there is a lot of interest in community engagement, in community mobilization. We have seen the recent protests being an example of community mobilization. but it's also important that people start releasing some power, and sit down on equal footing with community members. and really start recognizing this expert in everyone! This is a lesson that I learned very early in my career. As a young practitioner in Angola, I was basically working on malaria prevention in refugee camps. And I had, in one of these (meetings), encountered a young mother approaching me. And she just came to thank me for being there but she also said, Look What you are talking about, malaria prevention, in this moment is not important to me. What I'm concerned about is where my children are going to sleep tonight, whether they are going to have food, and that fact my husband just recently died.' And this was a very important moment in my career, in which I learned about the importance of attending first to the needs and priority of the communities we we serve. So I think that this is an important moment for the Health Equity and racial equity movement. A moment in which we need to put health and social justice at the forefront of everything we do. A moment in which we have to make every action and policy count toward heath equity. And making sure that the community voices are heard, and that they are incorporated in our communications, in our policy, in our intervention(s).

Wow! Thank you for that. thank you for the Angola story too. And and for the emphasis on these, on the kind of coming together the institutionalizing, the formalizing, the codifying of these practices that have been going on in different places around the world for for decades now but let's go ahead and make that mainstream. Let's go ahead and really focus on seeing the expertise that's in the communities, and engaging that in every step of the process. Thank you Dr. Schiavo for being on the show and sharing this with us.

Thank you very much.

This has been 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. I'm Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, live via Skype with Dr. Renata Schiavo.

The post Dr. Renata Schiavo on community-driven approaches to communication appeared first on Health Communication Partners.

Hear the story of a complicated workflow improvement case, and learn what you can do to help your own workflow…flow more smoothly.

Is something in your workflow not working? I’ll help you get the workflow improvement process off on the right foot in today’s episode.

Hi everybody! This is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, ranked number 20 in the Top 100 Podcasts in Social Sciences. Giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement, experience and satisfaction since 2017. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator with expertise in communication and education. I’m here to dig into some of what we might take for granted about communication in our professional lives. If you want to strengthen the work you can do in your professional sphere, this is a place for you because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make.

Yes, I had a client who identified a workflow problem that their staff was having. And this was happening right as a big new collaboration was about to be launched. Now first of all, their workflow was important to their service delivery. And they needed that workflow problem fixed pronto! And in a way that would be quick to implement because of this new collaboration. Because it had a lot to do with communication they called me. I’ll tell you what we did that I think can help your workflow improvement go smoothly.

Now this show, you may know, is about real problems faced by real professionals, and I have a holistic approach to communication. But we’ve had kind of a systems-level flow going on these past few weeks. I wonder what that indicates, right? I’ve had a couple episodes on quality improvement, now one on workflows, so maybe just in general people are thinking more in systems ways, which is good. The show started with patient-physician communication, hence the title, but a couple of years in, I started getting a lot of requests for interprofessional communication. Which definitely has kept on going, so I’ve included more in that in the show as well. This workflow improvement I was asked to help with involved patient communication, and interprofessional communication, and different organizations communicating with each other as well.

Now workflows in general are designed to help us get our work done by looking at the structures or patterns or flows underneath parts of our work that we tend to do often, or regularly repeat. And how these typically go, the steps we and others typically take. They can be handy for groups of any size. I even find them helpful as a small business owner.

And it’s hard to think of a workflow that doesn’t include communication. So many workflows in healthcare and public health include not only patient communication, but also interprofessional communication. And increasingly, like in this project, we’re seeing separate, different organizations tied into the same workflow, and therefore needing to communicate.

Public Health, we know, has a long history of this, but now with value-based care, the triple aim, social determinants of health, health systems are also integrating other organizations into their clinical workflows. If this is you, there’s a 2020 study on workflows and integrated care that I’ll drop into the show notes.

I also found this reminder from our friends at AHRQ: “Always keep in mind that workflow occurs between organizations, between people at a clinic, in one’s head, and before, during, or after a patient visit.” Now the one I’m talking about had all of the above, maybe yours does too! I’ll link to that AHRQ page because it has a tool on it on how to analyze workflow.

Because everyone with a workflow is probably aware there is also ongoing process improvement, which is also something I help with. We want to continue to assess workflows even after we’ve implemented them — because of all the benefits, right?

You’re likely familiar with these. Providers can improve efficiency, increase care coordination, improve error prevention, streamline processes, and otherwise deliver higher quality care, maybe even at a lower cost.

So I had this client, they had spotted a problem in their workflow, asked for my help, and in this case it was service delivery improvement. And there was a lot going on. It was very elaborate. Many complex interactions, sometimes two people, a dyad, sometimes the triad, many communication steps. We had multiple teams interacting, within teams and across teams, and also interacting with patients and caregivers. We had face-to-face communication, digital communication, voice communication.

But however much communication your workflow has, whatever kind of workflow it is, whatever and whoever your workflow includes, if you want to get those great benefits from your workflow, it needs to work well. And to help it work well, I suggest that you start here: talk to the people involved.

Before you do anything else, before you take another step, talk to the people who use this workflow.

I know, it can be so tempting to just take care of it yourself. Especially if you’re in a leadership position or the person on the team in charge of keeping your eye on the workflow. You call up that one colleague, between the two you come up with something. It’s faster, you got control of it. I get it. Please do this brainstorming. We need your brilliance.

I’m saying, talk to your people, and make that your starting point if it’s not already.

Why? Many reasons.

First of all, the people doing the work know a thing or two about the work. We are living through an extreme example of the lost opportunities when you don’t ask the people who know the work. These drastic cuts that we’re seeing in the federal government, dismantling of whole agencies and departments. As these have been going on, we’re hearing in every news outlet across the board, we’re hearing workers, leaders, directors in these agencies and departments saying, “We know change is needed, and we know how it can be done, and we’re willing to do it.” But these people are not being listened to, sometimes being fired. These people are best positioned to see the problems, understand where change is needed, how changes can be made, yes even drastic changes, and take responsibility for these changes. So remember, you have people like this in your organization. You’re probably one of them.

Another reason to talk to people first is to help you have more confidence in your decisions. The problem you see, validate it with your team. Once you agree on the problem, you’re halfway to a solution. And when you’ve talked to the people, you know you’re representing them, their voices, in any solution.

Another reason: I’ll tell you what my client said. They said, “Your approach was helpful because it aligned really well with our existing ways of working. You’re not coming in to teach us ‘you must use this,’ because people already have their ways of working and that creates the buy-in, that creates the forward momentum.

I appreciated that, because my client, I suppose, could have quickly put together a solution on their own and told people “use this.” But what they really needed was a solution that would be meaningful, make Sense to people work It wasn’t just they needed a solution any solution, quickly. They needed one that worked quickly that could be implemented quickly and that’s also about cultural fit. And that’s what I work hard to do.

Talking with your people will help you with cultural fit. In fact, a lack of cultural fit or a lack of kind of cultural alignment, is a reason many initiatives struggle or fail. I just read a news story this week about improvement initiatives that might be backfiring, but are certainly cringey. One of them was Starbucks requiring baristas to write notes, like little friendly notes, on people’s cups in what the reporter called forced joy (here’s the author’s Linked post in case of firewall). They added that the only people who looked like they were having fun with this initiative, was the Starbucks employees who were going to TikTok and absolutely slamming this initiative. So, if you don’t want to deal with that kind of a headache, talk to your people first.

And it doesn’t have to be a big deal. We did a short, and I mean short, survey. We talked to a cross-section of folks. I met with people one-on-one for super brief conversations. You could do that. If you have regular meetings you could all grab a few minutes in the meeting. Just make sure you’re recording or capturing people’s suggestions somehow.

And now a bonus point: if your workflow includes patient communication like ours did, make sure you’re talking to patients as well. However you can. Maybe that patient advisory group. Again, ugh! Another step? Yes.

I got to talk directly to a patient and wow was it worth it! I was so grateful for that, because she made such an important contribution. She had an idea no one else had thought of. She was one of the last people I talked to. And her idea wasn’t mentioned in the literature that I read either. When she said it, I literally smacked my head. Why didn’t I think of that?! And when I presented it to the leadership, they had the same reaction. They’re like, Oh, what a great point!

So if you do this, if you talk to patients, please circle back with them and tell them the result of the workflow improvement, and the importance of their contribution.

Listen to your people. I loved working on this project and the client was happy too. So if you want expert help improving your workflow, or other process improvement activities where communication is involved, contact me. We can connect on LinkedIn or you can visit healthcommunicationpartners.com and click on contact. This has been “10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication” from Health Communication Partners, Audio Engineering and Music by Joe Liebel, Additionally Music by Alexis Rounds.

The post Does your workflow need work? Make this your first step appeared first on Health Communication Partners.

Learn about 7 common QI trip hazards, and how you can avoid them.

Now, I don’t typically start conversations with negatives, but sometimes when I talk with clients, especially super focused go -getters, they’ll ask me right out the gate, Tell us what we’re getting wrong so we can fix it! This episode’s for you, and it’s about quality improvement.

Hi, everybody. This is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, ranked number 20 of the Top 100 Podcasts in Social Sciences. Giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement experience and satisfaction since 2017. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator with expertise in communication and education. I’m here to dig into some of what we might take for granted about communication in our professional lives. If you wanna strengthen the work you can do in your professional sphere, this is a place for you because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make.

Did you know I work with business? Better communication is an investment that makes your business more efficient, less time lost to misunderstandings, better communication between groups, things get done with less muss and fuss. Want some of this? Visit healthcommunicationpartners and click on contact. Or find me on LinkedIn. You can even email me, Anne Marie at h-cpartners .com.

So there are so many quality initiatives going around everywhere. There’s quality measures flying around everywhere. You’re probably involved with some of them. Continuous quality improvement is a thing. I did an episode about QI a few weeks ago. It was well received. This is kind of a follow-up. This is about some common QI trip hazards that I’ve experienced firsthand and also learned about from others.

Now, this advice is not specific to any industry, but most of the examples are from health care. So consider this a refresher for you or the QI person in your life. With links to resources in the show notes with also transcripts to this episode and all episodes and they’re available at  HealthCommunicationPartners.com. Okay, here we go.

Number one mistake: Using one size fits all quality guidelines. This means we’ve got to take a close read of any guidelines we’re using to see: how equitable are they? That is, are they working better for some groups than for others, just by how they’re written? I’m going to put a link in the show notes to an article called From Quality Improvement to Equality Improvement Projects. It’s a scoping review and framework. and the authors say, guidelines themselves might lack inclusivity. They also have a nice lit review, so go ahead and check out that one in the show notes.

Okay, mistake number two. Thinking all quality measures are created equal. That’s right, the tools you use to assess that quality need to be looked at closely as well. If you want to get really good at this, I’m going to put links in the notes to a Johns Hopkins webinar on equity in quality improvement featuring Dr. Andrew Anderson. Definitely check that webinar out. It’s on YouTube.

Alright, mistake number three. Forgetting to center the person. Person-centeredness is crucial, and yet it can be tough to keep doing, right? We gotta keep tying ourselves back to the person. I’m helping a client with this right now. So we wanna make sure that what we’re doing centers people, people’s perspectives and their experiences. Ask yourself, how straight is the line from this measure to the person that it’s gonna be impacting? Could this line be straighter? Be honest.

Alright, mistake number four. Not talking to the folks on the front lines. Now in QI, it can feel like it’s only the people with the dashboards who can make the calls and be valuable to talk to, but that would be cutting us off from an incredibly valuable set of perspectives: Frontline practitioners. Those involved in the work. No a thing or two about doing the work. So put time in your plans to talk to them and write down what they say.

Mistake number five: letting data collection become a burden. Quality improvement leaders, you need to watch out that the collecting of data doesn’t become onerous in itself, ’cause We’re trying to improve things around here, right? I’m gonna go ahead and put a link in the show notes to an article called Organizational Health Literacy Quality Improvement Measures with Expert Consensus. The authors say measurement burden is a concern in the US healthcare system. Now, yeah, we need to be accountable, but that accountability can’t take us away from our work so much, or we’re setting up antagonism and risking resentment. The authors recommend that you ask people at multiple levels “how QI initiatives could help them further their progress” toward other requirements, other aims, other goals. And I really like this advice because, hey, double dipping for the win. People don’t mind being accountable for metrics that matter to them.

This brings me to mistake number six: counting what’s easy to count instead of what matters. You’ve heard this before, right? If quality improvement is gonna be part of how we work, you gotta be vigilant about how you’re doing it. So if it starts to feel like you’re measuring things that are easy to count, but not valuable to people, not valuable to staff, trust yourself, trust that noticing and pause. Take time to step back, take a look. Not just how you’re measuring quality, but what are people expected to do with the outcome of this study, right? What kinds of assumptions are being made about how these measurements are gonna translate into concrete practice recommendations. The clearer they can be, the easier it’s going to be to get people on board with them as well.

Mistake number seven: working in silos or in isolation. Now for this, I’m going to put a link into an article. It’s kind of old. It’s from 2016, but I’m including it because it’s good and also because of the title, Does Quality Improvement Improve Quality. The authors say, too much improvement work is undertaken in isolation at a local level, failing to pool resources and develop collective solutions and introducing new hazards in the process. So link to the rest of that article in the notes.

This brings to mind the parable about the blindfolded people encountering the elephant. You’ve seen that one. Though everyone’s individual level deductions in that parable made sense, what they really needed to work accurately and effectively was each other’s perspectives so that they could get the bigger picture. So make sure you give yourself time to talk to your colleagues, help take off each other’s blindfolds, and zoom out to see the bigger picture.

If you want to talk more about quality improvement, find me on LinkedIn. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel. You can visit Health Communication Partners and click on Contact. This has been 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. Audio Engineering and Music by Joe Liebel, additional music from Alexis Rounds.

Thanks for listening to 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners, LLC. Find us at healthcommunicationpartners.com.

The post Don’t make these 7 Quality Improvement mistakes appeared first on Health Communication Partners.

Interviews or evaluations are tough, but storytelling helps. Here’s how to use the SWOT matrix to help you prepare 4 stories you can use to answer common interview questions.

This is an episode that I was planning for later in the year, but I’m doing it now because of all of the government employees who have recently lost their jobs and suddenly and abruptly are finding themselves job searching. This episode I hope will be helpful for when it’s interview time. I’m going to talk about four stories you can share in a job interview.

Hi everybody, this is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, ranked #20 in the Top 100 Podcasts in Social Sciences, giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement, experience, and satisfaction since 2017. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator with expertise in communication and education. I’m here to dig into some of what we might take for granted about communication in our professional lives. If you want to strengthen the work you can do in your professional sphere, this is a place for you because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn, get inspired, and most importantly make the difference we got into our jobs to make.

Now you may know this show is about actual questions and issues raised by actual professionals, and I was coaching somebody a while ago on self evaluation, and I thought this would be good episode to run maybe in the late fall. But no. The last few weeks have shown this is the least I can do to come out and support some of the civil servants who have found themselves in this just crazy position. Please take good care of yourselves. Please prioritize your health and the mental health issues that come along with sudden job loss.

When you are ready to get back on the horse and go ahead and apply, I hope this can be helpful when it comes to interviewing. Because it’s an uncomfortable kind of scenario in the best situation. All this talking about ourselves can be incredibly cringey. We don’t like hearing our own voices, right? It gets our imposter syndrome flaring up. So I want to try to get you back on more comfortable ground. Because we can be more comfortable when we’re telling stories, especially stories about something we’re passionate about.

So I’m going to suggest four stories specifically, and the way I’m going to suggest this is through something you’ve probably heard of before, the SWOT analysis. Or SWOT analysis. Where S stands for strengths, W for weakness, O for opportunities, and T for threats. It’s used to analyze like a whole business or a unit within business, but I’m going to go ahead and take it kind of off script because I think we could use it to think about ourselves, and some of the stories we could tell about ourselves when we have to self -evaluate or when we’re going into an interview.

So I’m going to go through each of those letters and suggest some stories that you might tell, give you some things to think about, and then I’ll wrap up with some tips.

Okay, first of all, S for strengths. Yes, this is where you’re going to tell stories about your strengths. And that can make people uncomfortable right off the bat. But remember, there’s no wrong answers to “tell me about yourself. Tell me what you do well.” If something like that makes you uncomfortable, you might be more likely to talk about your most significant achievements.

Thinking about achievements is nice because that allows you to shift to a project or a problem, and the strengths you used to do something great there. Accomplishments are natural stories too because there’s a beginning and a middle and an end. And that’s what you want to do, is be able to tell a story. Accomplishments usually also come with some of their own data. So give yourself a chance to think about what you consider some of your significant achievements in your last role.

And slow down the train of what happened. Let yourself think about: what was the beginning? How did that start? What was going on, middle of the way through? How did I wrap it up? What happened in the end? All the steps it took to get you there.

This can be tricky to do, especially if you’re really good at your job, because you just did it. But slowing this down and getting to some of the steps and the details can really help people appreciate your expertise. Not everyone knows what you know. And of course, if you have other folks working with you, give them flowers in this story, too.

So for S, I’m also going to suggest you have a little bit of a backup story because it’s about strengths. Do yourself a favor and as cringey as this might make you feel–it’s okay, no one will know, you’re just going to write it down for yourself–get yourself a couple answers to this question: What have people said they like about working with you? Because they have! So go ahead and remember it or find those emails or find those messages.

It’s good to have these in your pocket especially if you get real nervous or self -conscious, because talking about these good things people have said about you gets you outside your own head. You are telling the truth. Someone did say that thing about working with awesome you.

Okay, second story, W, weaknesses. Ugh! This is particularly ugh. No one likes talking about our weaknesses, so I hope you like my approach. I suggest you think about something you thought would be easy for you, but wasn’t. Maybe it’s part of a project, maybe it’s a task, maybe it’s an interaction.

I like this approach because it’s an automatic story setup. Here’s the setting, here’s how it started out, here’s me going into it, here’s what I thought I was getting into, and then bam! Unpleasant surprise. It's a great storytelling chance for you, right? You can talk about how you handled it in the moment if you want to. You could share some thoughts you’ve had about it since, or you can limit yourself to what you’ve learned. How you know this is something you want to work on because it’ll help you in the future, and leave it at that.

Now S and W on the SWOT chart are like internal tasks or internal traits. So we’re done with the internal, your internal world now, so you can relax! O and T are about the external world. So let’s get into them.

O is opportunities. Here, go to town. Give yourself a whole lot of these, right? Any work situation you think would be a good stretch for you. Or a good place for you to put your energy and your attention. Or work situation you’re looking forward to. Here again, give yourself several opportunities to talk about and I’m going to suggest that repetition is your friend.

I was in a storytelling workshop recently and one of the presenters said this, “Repetition is your friend even when it feels ridiculous.” I thought that was such a good point, not just the reminder about repetition, but that it can feel ridiculous, but it feeling ridiculous should not stop you from doing it.

So especially in an interview, when you’re talking about the image of the professional that you want this person to have, this opportunities that you are looking forward to, don’t limit yourself and also keep repeating yourself. Okay.

Oh, and also, if you’re a little stuck here. Hey, I’m going to go ahead and make a plug. It’s always nice to talk about how you’re going to improve your communication. Maybe there’s a group of people that I really want to get better at communicating with–suppliers, or I really want to get better at communicating with my mentees. Or you could pick a part of your communication. I want to be better with those emails after a meeting. I always drag those out, and I really want to get better at those. So always a good thing to talk about improving your own communication.

Okay, T, last one, threats. For this one, I’m going to suggest this is a good chance to show off. And here’s why: Threats are what you notice that’s coming down the pike, and how you’re going to deal with it if it does.

So what threat stories do is show that you are watching the field. You are paying attention to your profession, you’re paying attention to your market, you’re paying attention to your industry. So think of a potential situation that’s outside of your control, that could cause trouble for you, your team, your division, your whole industry. The point is that you’re keeping your eye on it, in case you have to manage it. So in the threat story, you’re going to acknowledge this thing. Whatever it is, you’re going to show us that you see it because you are savvy that way. And you have a plan or you’re cooking up a plan in case it comes to pass. Here’s how you’re going to deal with it.

So that’s the threat story. So SWOT, four stories you can tell in an interview.

Here are my tips to wrap this up:

First of all, give yourself something you are excited to talk about. Every one of these stories should show you in a good light, and if you go ahead and listen back to this episode, you’ll see that I’m encouraging you toward that: showing yourself in a positive light. Because it also helps you give yourself something you’re excited and passionate about. You’re going to tell a better story, people are going to be more engaged, and they’re also going to remember your story better.

Secondly, brainstorm a little, don’t hold back. And remember this is preparation. You’re writing things down. So if it feels too much, if it starts to feel a little bit cringy, step away from it. Do it in chunks, put it down, do something else, and come back to it.

Third suggestion, data, have it, use it, right? You’ve heard this suggestion before, anything quantifiable, work it into your conversation.

And finally, I’m going to suggest you involve a friend, right? Yes, practice these stories to an actual human being. That flip that your stomach just did, you can reduce that flip actually happening during the interview if you practice ahead of time, and the benefit being you can also turn around to your friend or colleague and offer to listen to them work out their stories ahead of time.

I take a holistic view of communication because I know how important it is to teamwork, to problem solving, and to innovation. So if your organization wants some help on this, contact me. This has been 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, Audio Engineering and Music by Joe Liebel, additional music from Alexis Rounds.

Thanks for listening to 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners LLC. Find us at healthcommunicationpartners .com.

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