Empathy, compassion more important in healthcare in new phase of the pandemic

Empathy and compassion have always been important elements in providing quality care, and this has been highlighted during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, as many patients have been treated in isolation, cut off from family and loved ones.

Empathy is well and good in theory, but what does it look like in practice? How can healthcare organizations know they're doing the right things for patients?

Those are the questions that were addressed in the HIMSS21 digital session, "Embedding a Culture of Empathy and Compassion," moderated by Cleveland Clinic Chief Experience Officer Adrienne Boissy. Speaking on the topic were Ben Moor, anesthesiologist formerly of Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Plymouth, and Helen Riess, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Empathetics.

Even before the pandemic, there were standard ways of measuring the patient experience, mostly through surveys and patient ratings. But the ongoing public health emergency saw pervasive isolation and loneliness among hospital patients, and these factors aren't always taken into account in the typical survey process.

"We're still hearing stories about how alone people felt and how awful it was to be separated from their loved ones," said Riess.

According to Moor, there's often a disconnect between what providers felt they should be doing for their patients and what they were allowed to do. That's something that needs to be taken into account, he said.

"You have to be careful that the organization isn't self-defeating when you go after those issues," said Moor. "You can take an organization with lots and lots of good, well-meaning people, but that doesn't mean the organization will be a benevolent entity. You have to bring it back to the patient and the employee, and allow them to decide what is best for the patient in terms of not just their medical care but their well-being."

Electronic health records can actually bolster a hospital or health system's empathic capabilities. Since facing a computer screen and not making eye contact with a patient is a non-starter, the EHR can actually provide prompts for empathy skills, for instance by reminding nurses and physicians about personal details from the patient's past. 

"There's unlimited opportunity to use the electronic record to just help us connect in a way that we share information by really tuning into what's important to the patient," said Riess.

While still at Beth Israel Deaconess, Moor decided once he was vaccinated and wearing personal protective equipment that he would start popping into patients' rooms to see how they were faring and to provide them with a human connection. After doing that on the side for a while, he started encouraging other staff to do it as well on an informal basis.

That, to his surprise, led to some discussions with lawyers in which they cautioned that this may be a rule violation. But Moor pressed forward, deciding that sometimes there's a difference between a strictly compliant thing and the right thing.

Riess was unsurprised by the anecdote.

"Hospitals are risk-averse," she said. "There's the importance of patient safety and infection control. But there's also a risk of not prioritizing relationships. Lawyers are trained to mitigate risk in ways they understand -- keeping the hospital safe and clean, and everyone's identity protected. But they don't think about how we're risking people's lives by keeping them so isolated from humanity. Sometimes you have to break some rules to do the humane thing."

"It's a peculiar time in history," said Moor. "We can't go back to the way things were. I'm a big advocate for a certain amount of anarchy in healthcare -- you should be an advocate for the patient even if it's against what your organization is telling you. Other people should be allowed to go out there and do what's right for the patient."
 

Twitter: @JELagasse
Email the writer: jeff.lagasse@himssmedia.com