Improving Clinical Communication and Promoting Health through Concordance-Based Patient Education

Abstract

In recent years, communication education has been used as a means of improving the clinician–patient relationship and promoting health. The focus of these interventions has primarily centered on clinician training. An area that has received less focus, although equally important, is training patients to be good communicators. The purpose of the paper is to first introduce clinician–patient ‘concordance’ as a conceptual framework for patient communication education. Second, we provide a review and critique of the literature on existing patient communication interventions. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of two specific patient populations that face challenges and obstacles in clinician–patient communication and preliminary work we are doing in these areas: complementary and alternative medicine users and the medically underserved.