In Reply: Where Reshaping Communications in Healthcare Service Begins

Any act of communication involves decision-making: what to say, how to say it, what to omit. Our biggest decision in writing “Improving How Clinicians Communicate with Patients: An Integrative Review and Framework” was to focus on the communication of clinicians rather than giving equal attention to patients’ communication. To be sure, patients co-create the healthcare service experience, including its communications, as our article discusses. However, we saw our greatest potential value in helping clinicians envision how they can improve their own communications: verbal, nonverbal, and listening. Our article’s Figure 2 presents the dynamic interplay between clinician and patient communication, a dyad rich with potential for further academic research. Both sides of that dyad merit much more study, and service researchers are well positioned to lead the way. The commentaries by Joseph Jacobson and by Jonah Berger and Grant Packard enrich the content of our paper, and we greatly value their care and thought in responding to it. An experienced medical oncologist, Jacobson has had many emotional, difficult conversations in sharing bad news with patients and family members. It is gratifying that our article resonated with him. Marketing professors Berger and Packard, leading communications researchers, offer excellent suggestions for future work, and we appreciate their affirmative remarks. To extend the dialog, we now reply to those two commentaries.