Building bridges to improve communication in healthcare

Dr. Gregory Makoul is internationally recognized for expertise in physician-patient communication and shared decision making as well as a radical common sense, person-centered approach to healthcare innovation.  He is Chief Transformation Officer at NRC Health which acquired PatientWisdom, named one of the 100 companies in the world with the greatest potential to change healthcare under his leadership as Founder and CEO.  Dr. Makoul is also on voluntary faculty at the Yale School of Medicine and the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, following 15 years on the full-time faculty at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, where he was Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for Communication + Medicine.  He devoted six years to care transformation as Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer / Chief Academic Officer at Saint Francis Care, an integrated delivery system based in Hartford, where he founded the Connecticut Institute for Primary Care Innovation and gained real-world experience to complement his work in academic medicine.  In 2018, Dr. Makoul received the George Engel Award from the Academy of Communication in Healthcare (ACH) for outstanding research contributing to the theory, practice, and teaching of effective healthcare communication and related skills; he also received the Lynn Payer Award from ACH in 2003 for outstanding contributions to the literature, and was named a Learning Health System Research Pioneer by the Association of American Medical Colleges.  The tools he developed for teaching and assessing communication skills – as well as his award-winning series of videos for bringing patient perspectives into healthcare – are used worldwide. Dr. Makoul earned a BA in Biology-Psychology at Wesleyan, PhD in Communication Studies at Northwestern, and MS in Health Care Delivery Science at Dartmouth.  He and his wife live on the Connecticut shoreline, where they enjoy the outdoors almost as much as visits from their two daughters.

A hallmark of my career has been building a bridge between communication science and healthcare, a process that balances interdisciplinary perspectives, scientific rigor, and creativity.  In my work, I strive to synthesize and extend existing bodies of knowledge as well as develop and test instruments, models, and interventions that will be useful in the real world.  Through this approach, I have helped shape research, education, and practice at the intersection of communication and medicine.  We will discuss some tangible examples of connectivity, ranging from working with Dr Theo Schofield to start what became the International Conference on Communication in Healthcare (ICCH) series, working with international colleagues to translate and culturally adapt the Communication Assessment Tool (CAT), and leading consensus statements about communication in clinical encounters.