News and Insights

Scaling Up Empathy: Designing a Health System that Treats People as People

August 5, 2025

Every frustrating moment you experience as a patient can be traced back to a health care structure designed and built to serve institutional priorities, not necessarily to meet patient or caregiver needs. It is easy to imagine a better experience when navigating care, which features fewer forms and clipboards, less time on hold, better communication and easier-to-understand billing.

Today, as organizations strive to improve outcomes, reduce disparities, and build health equity, an increasing number of wise leaders recognize that empathy is not simply a better customer-care strategy. They know that, more than a so-called “soft skill,” empathy is a healing skill.

Performance is always influenced by process. To change the culture of health care toward a more empathetic and effective model, we first need to change the structure of the system that supports care.

Chronic stress is a well-documented contributor to cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders, mental illness and premature death. Struggling to decipher a complex, disjointed health system means that stress has become a systemic health care challenge.

It also may feel like a personal attack. Patients dealing with illness or caring for sick family members or aging parents must become part-time administrators, tracking down forms, fighting denials, and reconciling contradictions between payer and provider. They are forced to spend time proving that they or their loved ones are sick enough to deserve care.

This is not just intensely frustrating. It’s clinical sabotage.

The American Psychological Association continues to note that health-care access issues and financial worries are among the top drivers of anxiety in the US. Delays, denials and disputes don’t just hurt emotionally—they hurt physiologically.

Health system empathy

Health innovation may be seen as centered on technologic and biomedical advances such as AI, new drugs, connected devices, and cutting-edge surgical techniques. Yet one of the most profound advancements now emerging is the recognition that empathy is a skill to be cultivated, a standard to be measured, and a behavior to be embedded in care delivery.

Empathy is often framed as an individual trait. But what if it’s a skill to be taught and a commodity to be measured and valued? As the adage goes: “You respect what you inspect.”  We respect balance sheets, sales goals and the patient throughput.  Medicine may have become an efficient production line, but is that what we want as consumers of care?

Medical education is evolving to reflect this insight. Schools nationwide, including NYU Grossman, the University of Michigan, and Harvard Medical School, are among many institutions integrating communication training and ethics into their core curricula. Looking ahead, perhaps empathy will no longer be considered a “soft skill.” For some, it is already seen as a core clinical competency.

Medical schools emphasizing humanism and whole-person care prove that empathy can be scaled. For example, the Arnold P. Gold Foundation works with nearly every medical school nationwide to integrate compassion, connection and collaboration into training through programs that take normative moments and turn them into emotional milestones. The White Coat Ceremony and the Gold Humanism Honor Society instill a professional ethos grounded in respect for the patient perspective.

Studies show that empathetic providers improve adherence, trust and outcomes. Yet the way in which medical training is structured has the effect of eroding empathy through overwork and burnout. Institutions that integrate reflective practice, narrative medicine and communication skills into curricula are helping future clinicians retain their passion for patient care, which is often what brought them to medicine in the first place.

Hospitals and health systems are also creating roles to bridge the empathy gap. Patient advocates and navigators help people by sharing their experience negotiating the system, understanding options and accessing resources. These newly minted health professionals, a form of “patient sherpas,” offer more than a shoulder to lean on. They also guide institutions to design better systems.

By identifying common friction points, they highlight where the system falls short. The emergence of patient-family advisory councils and the inclusion of patient representatives in board-level decision-making signal a shift in mindset from doing things to patients to doing things for—and with—them. 

Empathy Can and Must Be Scaled

The value of patient navigators is already evident. A 2017 study in the Journal of Oncology found that they significantly reduced time to diagnosis and treatment, particularly in underserved communities.

Kaiser Permanente’s emphasis on human-centered design is a powerful example. By embedding patient feedback into care design, they’re aligning infrastructure with the values of empathy and equity. Similarly, organizations like Planetree International help hospitals implement person-centered care principles systemwide, integrating them into everything from executive leadership to bedside routines. Accreditation programs and recognition models further reinforce the cultural shift toward empathy.

Empathy must be built into the structure. It is about better appointment systems, clearer signage, timelier callbacks, more accessible websites, and more intuitive workflows. While this may sound operational, it is: every improved detail shapes and builds trust.

Life science companies are also responding. As the industry integrates patient insights into clinical trial design and regulatory strategy, it becomes evident that empathy is also driving efficiency. The results are fewer clinical trial dropouts, faster recruitment, and higher-quality data. As McKinsey noted in a 2022 report, patient-centric trials can cut startup timelines by 30% and enrollment times by 40%

Digital health innovators like Belong. Life is leading on this front. LLMs that allow people to access care on their terms—via chat, video, or asynchronous messaging—remove traditional friction points. But technology alone is not a solution. The goal must be to use innovation to amplify human touch, not replace it.

Empathy must be everyone’s job description

“People want doctors who listen to them—not just their symptoms.” – Rita Charon, MD, PhD, founder of Narrative Medicine.

The responsibility for building empathy into the system cannot fall solely on frontline clinicians. Payers, product innovators, policymakers, and system leaders must all be accountable.

People often blame the system for its shortcomings. But the system is “people,” people who made choices that now shape experience. We can choose again.

When institutions redesign a waiting room or advocate for less burdensome paperwork intake, they are improving the system from the inside. So are insurers who simplify authorization, pharmaceutical companies that incorporate patient advisors, legislators who remove access barriers, and product innovators who magically transform molecules into healing miracles and make science accessible to the least STEM-aware person.

Health professionals understand that clear communication between provider and patient is itself a treatment. This truth must be extended across the entire health ecosystem. Every node in the system must be part of the conversation, from insurers to hospitals, from policy drafters to pharmacy benefit managers.

These improvements should not be viewed as lofty aspirations; they are process imperatives that can be achieved system-wide. Empathetic communication is not just a nicety. It is the infrastructure for trust, the enabler of care, and the difference between a patient suffering in silence and being the focus of healing action.

As stakeholders across the ecosystem embrace the power of the patient experience, empathy and outcomes will go hand-in-hand as a motivating principle. The first step is asking: “Would I want this for someone I love?”

Empathy is not a nicety. It is an operational, scalable necessity.