Docs could be one laugh away from ensuring better patient outcomes

You might not think medicine and improvisational theater can share the same stage. But that's now what medical students are saying.

Eighty-three of the 87 Northwestern medical students who took a 10-hour medical improv class say it made them better doctors, and 23 of the 27 medical students at Johns Hopkins report that the voluntary 8-hour improv program improved their interviewing skills.

With medical improv, which adapts improvisational theater principles and training techniques, doctors practice the “building blocks” that can help them better understand their patients, write Kate Watson, J.D., an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, and Belinda Fu, M.D., a clinical assistant professor in the department of family medicine at the University of Washington, in a recent commentary in The Annals of Internal Medicine.

But what does medical improv practice actually look like? It could feature two medical students chatting in what appears to be gibberish, with a third medical student looking befuddled though trying to pick up on non-verbal cues such as body language and vocal inflection to determine the content and context of the conversation.

Often, hilarity ensues during these exchanges, but it’s a side product rather than the main goal, which is to improve patient-centered communication. And better communication with patients translates into better clinical outcomes, improved chronic disease management and patient satisfaction, write Watson and Fu.

Additional benefits of medical improv training are an increased comfort level with uncertainty, surprise and ambiguity--all of which are inevitable aspects of a doctor’s day, they say.

One of the key principles that medical improv uses is that of “yes” and “and,” as previously reported by FiercePracticeManagement. This approach can be helpful if, for example, a patient struck down by a sore throat caused by a virus has searched the internet and discovered a worst-case diagnosis of esophageal cancer.

Here’s what the physician’s response can look like: "YES, I see your concern that some of your symptoms could overlap with something more serious--AND you can trust that we'll look into that further if you don't feel better within the time I predicted."

- read the commentary