You're aiming to foster collaboration with physicians. How do you cultivate trust for valuable feedback?

Here's my check-list: Transparency: Be upfront about your goals and limitations. Physicians appreciate knowing how their data will be used and how new tools integrate into their workflow. Pain-point: Show how your solution can alleviate their issues and help them to deliver better care. Expertise: Don't be shy to showcase the qualifications of your dev team. Physicians need confidence. Active Listening: Don't just present - engage! Show genuine interest in their concerns and feedback. Value Their Time: Make participation easy and efficient. Offer flexible feedback channels and concise surveys. Show Appreciation: Acknowledge their contributions and highlight how their feedback is shaping the software's evolution.

It's important to recognize that physicians are people with feelings, values, and lived experiences. When building rapport engage with as you would with others... with respect and finding common values and interests. That lets them know you care about truly connecting with them, and are interested in what matters to them. It sets the foundation up for trust and openness in the conversation.

Communicating clearly is important and more importantly is cultivating trust and psychological safety. When you cultivate trust the communication can be more open which allows for more clarity between people. When there is safety, communication can be more collaborative allowing for values to be shared and for all voices to be heard. Furthermore, when people feel safe they are more likely to communicate through any misunderstandings or miscommunications so that common ground can be found and held. When psychological safety is present goals and expectations become more clear because the communication is more collaborative and constructive.

Physicians feel like there is just more and more work being piled in them every day, especially in ways none of us signed up for when we pursued the career. If any changes are made, make an effort to teach why and you better make sure that those changes were made with the physician voice represented. All these administrative tasks are the last thing physicians want to do around a day full of making hard decisions surrounding the health and lives of patients.

I agree that providing resources, administrative help, and support to physicians enhances the busy physician’s ability to collaborate. I’m often struck by how few active mentoring support opportunities, how little clinical support, and how few resources are actually at the present day physician’s disposal. We tend to feel like we are doing more every year, with less and less support. Providing support will help minimize the burden on the physician, and help to streamline the project.

Respecting autonomy is important and respecting values is pivotal. Values are what's important to us and ultimately are what motivate our behaviors. When values are violated, it activates our threat detection center in the brain and activates our survival response. Autonomy may be a value in many, but it's important to discover what the most important values are to the physicians and healthcare providers are on the team. When people feel respected according to their values, they are more likely to be eager contributors and collaborators.

Understand patient care and day to day workflows at a granular level. Don’t expect to gain any trust unless your recommendations actually fit the processes of diagnosing and managing patients.