Background—The outcomes of procedures are often better when they are performed by more experienced physicians. We assessed whether the rate of complications after implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) placement varied with the volume of procedures a physician performed. Methods and Results—We studied 356 515 initial ICD implantations in the National Cardiovascular Data Registry–ICD Regis...

The association between the quantity of care that a physician or hospital provides and the quality of care that patients receive has been intensely investigated by clinicians and health services researchers. In the majority of the published data investigating this relationship, researchers have generally found that the higher the number of patients a physician or hospital treats with a specific...

STUDIES HAVE LINKED PHYSICIANS’ communication skills to a variety of positive outcomes, including patient and physician satisfaction, higher levels of adherence to therapeutic recommendations, improved physiological indicators of disease control, and enhanced physical and mental health status. Within this context, gender has stimulated a good deal of interest as a possible source of variation i...

Recent empirical findings document the role of nonverbal communication in cross-cultural interactions. As ethnic minority health disparities in the United States continue to persist, physician competence in this area is important. We examine physicians' abilities to decode nonverbal emotions across cultures, our hypothesis being that there is a relationship between physicians' skill in this are...

Furthermore, the core of good healthcare is centered on the patient supported by healthcare professionals. Fragmentation in communication by distance, culture or time – whether it be in the examination and diagnosis (including tests) or in the treatment phase – puts at risk the quality of the relationship between patient and physician/carer. Point-of-care testing can overcome the potentially di...

Based on a literature review, this article discusses the physician-patient relationship by presenting anthropological and communicational approaches, physicians' experiences as patients, key concepts showing the need for humanization of the patient-physician relationship, and some theoretical-philosophical reflections relating primarily to hermeneutics. Based on this framework, one can already ...