When a homeless person gets discharged from hospital, he needs a safe place to recover. When a poor patient faces a high co-pay for a medicine she needs, she is often too embarrassed to tell her doctor – instead, she may not fill the prescription.

Doctors don’t typically try to solve these social problems, but some want to do better at understanding patients’ lived experiences. In the latest episode of The Dose, Ishani Ganguli and Janine Knudsen, both primary care providers at innovative clinics, talk to Shanoor Seervai about how they are trying to treat a patient as a whole person, rather than focusing on a single medical condition. They discuss the successes and challenges of caring for patients in their daily practice in light of the findings of a recent survey of people living with serious illness in the United States.