Listening as Good Risk Management

I had an interesting conversation with a representative from my electronic medical record provider the other day.  We were talking about setting up a program in which the company would contact patients on my behalf to verify insurance information on claims that had been rejected, something I am bad about doing.  He mentioned that his company also does medical billing and that he was surprised to notice that psychotherapy patients were much more willing to talk about billing problems than were medical patients.  In fact, he said that medical patients were often defensive and unwilling to speak with his office whereas psychotherapy patients willingly worked with him to resolve billing problems.

It turns out there is a good reason for this difference. Because therapists spend so much time listening and directly spending time with patients, they form a stronger relationship with them.  For this reason, when someone calls asking about a bill for a service, the patient knows the provider and has a connection with that person.  The same is often not the case say, for a radiologist charge where the patient never even met the provider let alone have any connection with him or her.

In an interesting study (link to the study) about which physicians get sued for malpractice and which don't, Wendy Levinson M.D. and her colleagues found that getting sued did not just relate to poor medicine, in fact she found that doctors who got sued and those that had never been sued could be differentiated by the quality of their interactions with patients; their relationships.  She found that doctors who had never been sued (1) spent more time with each patient, (2) oriented patients to what was going to happen next, (3) used active listening skills, and (4) laughed more often with patients.

So it's really no surprise that therapists form stronger relationships with their patients and as a result they are less likely to be regarded negatively when things go wrong or when a claim gets scrambled.