PR’s Top Pros Talk… The Role of Communication in Patient Care

Cherilyn Cecchini, M.D., Partner at FINN Partners, reflects on the lessons she has learned from her residency and how they apply to her communications role. Cherilyn describes how medical professionals and agency leaders can effectively work together with patients and their families. Cherilyn also shares valuable information from her medical research.

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TRANSCRIPT:

DOUG: Is it possible that a skilled medical doctor could end up helping more people by becoming a communicator? Now it’s probably not a good idea if every doctor chose that path, that could be a problem, but our guest is proving that it is possible. Thanks so much for joining us.

CHERILYN: Thanks for having me, Doug.

DOUG: Right. So, can you elaborate on your remarkable career journey?

CHERILYN: Absolutely. I always had a strong passion for helping people. I became a certified EMT at 16. I was a camp counselor for numerous summers. And with all of those together, pediatrics was the perfect marriage of my interest. So went to medical school, pursued residency, and during my residency, two things became very apparent to me. One, how broken the medical system is, how I was spending almost no time with my patients. A lot of time on the phone with insurance companies and two, how there was so little information available to parents and patients that was accurate and credible. And so, to try and fix the second issue, I actually launched my own blog and started contributing content online just so that I could direct parents’ patients to what I knew was a reliable source of information. And at the same time, I was actually researching patient physician communication at End of Life. And I saw that that communication, that interaction plays a critical role in outcomes. And I realized in that moment, actually, that communication was part of the cure for those two problems. And so, I became really passionate about communication, wanted to make an even greater impact on patients than I was in my day-to-day role as a provider. And that led me to the agency side and to Finn, where I am now and it’s a place that there’s my exact mission to eliminate that fragmentation in the health ecosystem.

DOUG: You know, for someone looking to change their career from as a doctor or even inside any organization and for our viewers, any advice to them, obviously not becoming a successful video blogger, getting this huge following that might not work for everyone, though It’s not a bad path to try. What’s your advice for people, whether from medical fields or others, if they’re looking to sort of change the path or pivot as part of their passion?

CHERILYN: Have the conversations with as many people as possible who have left that traditional clinical path and start even looking online, go through networks on LinkedIn, do a search on platforms like Instagram to find some of those people and begin that search and explore online platforms that are made for physicians or even scientists who are looking to leave that traditional path. Dropoutclub.com is one of them. Beyond physician is another. So certainly, start there, talk to as many people as possible, network as much as they can. And I would say don’t be afraid to leave that linear path. Oftentimes it’s frowned upon to jump ship, leave clinical medicine, but there’s no reason why a physician cannot apply their skill set to a different non-traditional career.

DOUG: Yeah, well, you probably finished I guess what would be considered great 26 by the time you made that choice. So, there might be some other factors involved, but a key part in what you’re doing is really bringing communicators, bringing medical professionals, bringing patients together along with people like yourself, with the communications insight, what is some advice for others in the health and medical PR space for how they can do that as a better job. Obviously, not all of them are going to be armed with this intense experience of going through, you know, all the medical schoolwork, you know, becoming a resident.

CHERILYN: Medical professionals, patients, agency leaders all share a common goal, and that’s to deliver easy to understand information that’s relevant about a patient’s care journey. And these groups share that same frustration with the fragmented health ecosystem and communication really has the potential to be the glue. So, I would say by listening to one another and really understanding the needs of each group. We can all better communicate with each other and with those audiences to help heal that ecosystem together.

DOUG: You touch on this, but communicators and communications can actually impact patient outcomes in a significant way. What are some of the ways that you suggest doing that? And obviously one of the challenges is a lot of times you have to go through the filter of the media, so it might not be as easy. So how do you sort of get through those gatekeepers with content that’s going to really result in improved patient outcomes?

CHERILYN: In my research, we saw that there are four pillars to effective communication. The first is developing a therapeutic alliance. So really teaming together with the patient involving pediatric patients in medical discussions is the second. The third is communicating effectively with the whole family, whether that’s parents, stepparents, siblings. And then the fourth is collaborative dialogue with the interdisciplinary team, whether that’s nurses or occupational therapists, physical therapists, social workers. So, I think that those four core pillars, even though they’re a little bit specific to that hospital setting, can actually be applied outside of the hospital because communication plays such a huge role in patient care. So, it’s important to consider how patients, caregivers, the entire care team are receiving information to achieve the highest level of satisfaction. And so, in doing that, I think it’s up to us as communicators to consider what we’re saying. Are we meeting these four pillars, although not exactly, but closely, when we’re delivering content to a patient through their phone or through the television?

DOUG: It caught my ear that you mentioned that that could be an effective strategy outside sort of the hospital client base. If you want to look at it that way. Could you maybe elaborate on how that might work, say, for a pharma company or a nonprofit in a specific disease space?

CHERILYN: I think it’s really important to gather information, really hear the patients, understand what their specific needs are, what’s important to them, and what are they looking to achieve as far as outcomes or what does satisfaction look like to them? Because to one patient, a satisfactory outcome can look so different from another patient. So really understanding the nuances and the differences in the patients, the populations is critical. So that information gathering, the type of information that you gather as a provider in the hospital needs to be done outside of the hospital, too, and then applying it. So exactly as the providers are taking that information and then using it in their conversations with the patients and the care team and the family members and anyone else, any other key stakeholders, that’s exactly what the pharmaceutical companies are doing, just not always in a hospital room.

DOUG: One of the challenges is there’s so many levels that the communication we’re talking about was take place on whether it’s website materials, social media, through the earned media. How can you count on or at least improve the odds that all of the people and that includes the medical professionals who, you know, weren’t able to make the fortunate switch to communications like yourself? How do you make sure they’re all sort of speaking with a consistent message? Because I know that can be very difficult when there’s so many different sort of groups for their own self-interest as part of the equation. Of course, hopefully it’s all towards patient outcomes.

CHERILYN: That’s one of the biggest challenges that we as communicators face and certainly there are always different interests all merging toward that common goal as you as you mentioned, the patient outcomes. And I think by coming together again and having that active listening piece, really hearing what all of the different groups are saying and then using that, applying that knowledge to develop the language in a way that’s still easy to understand, that still communicating what is the most helpful, most effective for the patient. I think that’s really how we all can achieve the ultimate outcome for the patient. At the end of the day, it’s difficult. But by gathering the information, by really listening, by understanding what’s most meaningful to the patients and still also meets the needs of the physicians and the other groups, I think that’s where it starts to come together most often.

DOUG: Great. Well, hope our audience has been actively listening to you. If they have, they definitely got some great insights in how to be better at doing health care communications and other communications for that fact. Thanks so much for spending time with us.

CHERILYN: Thank you so much for having me.