A personal and trusting clinician-patient relationship matters. Our lives depend on it.
The BRANCH initiative is researching, developing, and deploying creative solutions that restore meaning and purpose for clinicians and support them in adapting to today’s challenging healthcare environment. These solutions will lead to better experiences for patients and improved outcomes.
BRANCH stands for Building Relationship Science for Advanced Networks in Communication and Health.
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Our goal: Rebuilding this essential relationship
Today’s healthcare clinicians are asked to handle complex cases during shorter appointments, navigate the bureaucracy of reimbursement and medical systems, and perform tasks that have little to do with providing compassionate care to their patients. Unfortunately, the confluence of these factors has depersonalized the clinician-patient relationship, which has in turn eroded patient trust and led to alarming levels of clinician burnout.
Bridging healthcare and relationship science
We seek to apply relationship-building and effective human communication strategies to improve healthcare delivery, equity, cost efficiency, and the experience of patients and clinicians. Our goal is to demonstrate the efficacy of relationship science approaches in healthcare, to build a strong foundation that enables such relationships to thrive in the healthcare environment of today and the future, and to document the impact of innovative healthcare delivery models that improve clinician-patient relationships.
Research & scholarship
Documenting how relationships and communication are the heart of medicine, advancing the evidence base for these practices and how disruptive innovations improve or threaten relationships in healthcare.
Education & training
Building these approaches into medical education, ongoing clinician training, and routine healthcare delivery.
Policy & advocacy
Facilitating federal, state, institutional, and individually led initiatives that drive the relational aspects of compassionate healthcare.
Our interdisciplinary approach to problem-solving
Codirected by Ashley Duggan, PhD, and Bernard Ewigman, MD, MSPH, the BRANCH initiative is building a sustainable, international, interdisciplinary consortium of researchers, clinicians, educators, and advocates. We are committed to identifying and advancing the best science on interventions within existing systems as well as system change that facilitate trusting, authentic, and effective clinician-patient relationships, while upholding values of the common good, health justice, healthcare advocacy, and diversity.
BRANCH seeks to involve individuals and organizations representing social diversity as well as a broad spectrum of professional expertise in medicine, healthcare, communication science, and relationship science, as well as experience as patients, clinicians, educators, advocates, and policymakers.