Harnessing healthcare provider’s behavior to improve health outcomes: an experimental, randomized, controlled crossover study

While the importance of the patient-provider relationship for health outcomes is well acknowledged, there is still a clear lack of basic science research investigating this notion.

The project aims at determining how healthcare providers’ behavior contribute to health outcomes, and to assess whether modulation of stress responses underlie this effect.

For the first time, biological processes will be experimentally activated while manipulating the providers’ behavior: healthy participants will experimentally be made transiently sick, and healthcare providers will be trained to have augmented (e.g., warm, attentive, caring) versus limited interactions with sick participants.

Healthcare providers’ behavior will be rated by participants, and classified from video recordings according to a validated checklist.

Objective (fever, immune) and subjective (e.g. sickness symptoms, pain) responses of sick participants, as well as stress and neuroendocrine responses, will be assessed.

With this rigorous experimental design, we will be able to determine how the healthcare provider’s behavior affect the physiological and subjective responses when sick, as well as whether stress mediates this effect.

By introducing innovative methods, findings from this project will provide evidence regarding the contribution of a healthcare provider’s behavior to health outcomes, and may help for the development of clinical recommendations to promote effectiveness and quality of healthcare services.