Got questions?

New AHRQ ad campaign encourages doc-patient communication

WASHINGTON -- The ad starts off pretty tamely, with an older woman sitting on the edge of examination table in a doctor’s office. Her doctor asks her if she has any questions. She says no.

A gospel organ fires up and the doctor sings – sings – “We’re not magicians. We can’t read your mind.”

What follows is about a minute’s worth of singing and dancing doctors, nurses, pharmacists and patients promoting the importance of asking questions of medical personnel.

The catchy, gospel-infused ad is part of the Department of Health and Human Service’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s new “Answers Are the Question” campaign, an effort to encourage patients and medical personnel to engage in effective communication.

Numerous studies and plain common sense tell us that better communication between doctors and patients can only result in good things, such as treatment compliance, yet, actually getting better communication between doctors and patients is not as simple as it seems.

“Anybody that’s ever interacted with healthcare – patient, provider, otherwise, friend of patient, whatever – knows that there are many barriers to effective communication happening,” said Jeff Brady, MD, patient safety portfolio lead for AHRQ’s Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety.

“There’s not a real big disagreement about the importance of effective communication,” he added. “Often missing is the step beyond that. How do you actually do it? How do you accomplish it? What does it actually look like? What do the individual stakeholders, patients and providers, what do they need to do?

What can they do differently? What can they do better? I think we’re really trying to as much as possible help facilitate that with this campaign.”

Produced with the Ad Council, AHRQ’s ad campaign is aimed at both clinicians and patients because effective communication is “a two-way street” said Linwood Norman, an AHRQ spokesperson.

“We’re not only going after the consumers with the public service videos, but we’re also going after the clinicians so that each side is reminded of the importance of engaging in effective communication,” he said.

The public service ads feature medical personnel and patients sharing their personal stories about the importance of communication. The ads have been distributed to more than 30,000 stations across the country. Supplemental materials are available for free and a DVD of snippets from the ads is in the works.

The ads targeting clinicians are running this fall in publications such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Academy of Physician Assistants and the Journal for Nurse Practitioners.

AHRQ has received positive feedback on the campaign even though it is still relatively new. The department plans on growing the campaign in the future.

“Healthcare is complex and there are places for it to go wrong,” said Farah Englert, assistant director of marketing and project officer for the ad campaign. “I think this isn’t going to solve all the problems but clearly getting patients and their doctors to really think and communicate more effectively, we hope, will make a difference.”

For more on quality and safety, see bit.ly/hfn-quality