Healthcare organizations often address patient experience, clinician well-being, access, engagement, quality, and retention as separate priorities. Yet two related PPRO Collaborative studies suggest that the strength of clinician-patient relationships may be a meaningful common pathway across several of these challenges.

Building on qualitative interviews with 20 U.S.-based primary care clinicians and a quantitative survey of 204 U.S. primary and specialty care physicians, this research report examines how clinicians view compassion, warmth, competence, relationship-building, well-being, and potential interventions to support relationship-centered care. The findings indicate that clinicians strongly believe compassion and patient relationships improve medical outcomes, while physicians reporting very strong patient relationships also report substantially higher well-being and engagement.

This report summarizes five key findings from these studies and identifies practical implications for healthcare organizations seeking to make relationship-centered care more consistent, sustainable, and operationally supported. The most promising interventions are those that increase capacity, save time, reduce documentation burden, and give clinicians the support needed to build stronger relationships with patients.