Restoring Human Connection in the Digital Age: A Conversation with Dr. Kevin Pho
Human connection definitely has been a challenge over the last few years.” — Dr. Kevin Pho
When was the last time you or your patients felt truly seen in a clinical encounter?
In this episode of NRC Health’s Patient No Longer podcast, Dr. Kevin Pho—internal medicine physician and founder of the influential KevinMD platform—joins for a powerful two-part conversation with host Ryan Donohue to explore the disconnection that patients and physicians alike are experiencing in modern healthcare.
Kevin Pho, MD, is a practicing, board-certified internal medicine physician, a national media commentator, co-author of the book, Establishing, Managing, and Protecting Your Online Reputation: A Social Media Guide for Physicians and Medical Practices, and an acclaimed keynote speaker.
Together, he and Ryan explore how tools like AI scribes can restore eye contact, why physicians’ online voices matter more than ever, and the hard truth that clinician well-being and patient experience rise and fall together.
This conversation meets leaders, clinicians, and patients where they are. If you’re tired, hopeful, and ready for care that feels human again, start here.
Key takeaways
- Make tech serve connection. Utilize AI scribes/ambient documentation, along with thoughtful telehealth, to bring eyes and empathy back to patients. Pilot in high-volume clinics and track eye contact, visit length, and after-hours charting.
- Treat social media like an extension of care. Patients look for answers online. Support clinicians in sharing credible guidance through training, brand guardrails, and a steady myth-busting cadence; otherwise, misinformation will fill the void.
- Burnout is a patient experience risk. With over half of clinicians depleted, empathy and safety suffer. Pair well-being and PX metrics, protect peer-connection time, and round on staff as intentionally as on patients. Frame clinician issues in terms of leaders track: access, safety, trust, loyalty.
- Own your online narrative. Patients Google their doctors. Publish verified CAHPS-derived ratings/reviews, and strengthen provider profiles with clear bios, photos, and authentic voice to build trust before the first visit.
- Design for listening, not just scripting. Fee-for-service pressures steal time. Redesign schedules/inboxes, remove low-value clicks, and measure whether patients feel heard as a leading indicator of outcomes and loyalty.
Watch the conversation: See Dr. Kevin Pho and Ryan Donohue unpack how to restore human connection in care. Stream the episode now.
Tech changed the exam room. Now it has to change the patient experience
Connection should be the outcome of every tool. Technology reshaped the visit in ways patients can feel.
Dr. Kevin Pho points out, “Technology has infiltrated the exam room. Physicians are behind a computer screen, typing and not maintaining eye contact with patients.”
Electronic records pulled our gaze from people to monitors, but the next wave of tools can return it.
He explains, “AI scribes can record a conversation, and then afterward, the AI would generate a note. Physicians can focus on the patient, get back to why they went into medicine in the first place.”
Telehealth, used thoughtfully, can also strengthen access and connection, especially for rural patients who often say the clinician is finally “looking at me.”
For leaders, this means making the connection to the design principle.
Pilot ambient documentation and AI scribes in high-volume settings and track eye contact, visit length, and after-hours charting.
Reconfigure rooms with shared screens or tablets so patients can see and shape their own story without losing face-to-face time.
Treat virtual visits as another doorway to the relationship. Empathy grows when the tech fades into the background and people come back into focus.
Social media is now a clinical setting, act like it
Patients don’t leave their health questions at the clinic door. They take them to their feeds.
Watch Dr. Kevin Pho break it down in the podcast here.
Dr. Kevin Pho is candid. “In 2025, I do think social media is important because that’s where a lot of our patients are. Platforms are backing off on content moderation. It is up to physicians to make sure that patients are exposed to reliable health information.”
His early “aha” came when a patient told him, “I read your blog post this morning,” revealing how trust can form outside the exam room.
Today, that reach is multiplied. “We’re able to connect not just one-to-one in the exam room, but one-to-many outside the exam room.”
For leaders, treat social channels like extensions of care.
Support clinician creators with media training, clear brand guidelines, and legal safe harbors, enabling experts to share their information confidently.
Build a steady myth-busting cadence that turns common questions into short posts, reels, or threads from credentialed voices.
And remember: if trusted clinicians don’t speak, someone else will, “there’s a void there that someone’s going to fill.”
Burnout is a patient experience risk
Burnout shows up in the exam room.
Dr. Kevin Pho acknowledges, “Fifty-plus percent of physicians are burnt out, and that’s really going to affect the patient experience. Burnt-out clinicians make more medical mistakes and are less empathetic.”
Leaders can respond by pairing patient experience and clinician well-being metrics in the same dashboards and board updates.
Alternatively, by establishing protected time for peer connection (including physician-only online communities).
Or, by sponsoring leadership rounding that checks on clinicians as thoroughly as it checks on patients.
Utilize social platforms as a support and catalyst. This can provide a space to listen, normalize struggles, and surface obstacles that necessitate organizational change.
When clinicians feel heard and supported, patients feel it, too.
To move the organization, frame physician issues as patient issues.
“Whenever we talk about issues that impact physicians, it always has to be framed in maximizing and optimizing patient care. That’s the way you move the needle,” Dr. Pho notes.
Translate burnout into the outcomes that leadership already tracks.
For example, access (fewer available appointments), safety (error risk), trust (lower listening scores), and loyalty (likelihood of recommending).
Use clear language that resonates at the top: if physicians are depleted, patients receive a lesser experience, and that’s a risk no health system can afford.
You already have a brand, own the narrative
Patients meet clinicians online long before they meet them in person.
Dr. Kevin Pho mentions, “A lot of my patients simply Google their doctors.”
Even physicians who don’t think about their online reputation already have one, often shaped by third-party sites.
His advice is pragmatic: “Social media is a great way to take control of your online narrative.”
For leaders, this means publishing verified, CAHPS-derived ratings and reviews on find-a-doctor profiles to provide consumers with trustworthy context.
And help clinicians differentiate themselves with clear bios, photos, and authentic communication styles, as trust begins well before the first visit.
Compassion without time is a setup. Address the system, not just the script
Patients know when they aren’t being heard.
Dr. Kevin Pho cautions, “When physicians don’t believe or don’t listen, patients don’t feel heard.”
Too often, the barrier isn’t intent. It’s incentives and design. In a fee-for-service world that “pays by volume, getting through that patient visit as fast as they can,” time to listen shrinks, and so does trust.
Leaders can respond by protecting listening time by redesigning schedules, triaging inboxes, and eliminating low-value clicks, while measuring what matters: patients’ reports of being heard and understood, as a leading indicator of patient experience and outcomes.
Empathy flourishes when the system makes room for it.
What this means for patient experience
Connection has to be the strategy.
Tools like AI scribes and telehealth should serve empathy, freeing clinicians to look patients in the eye rather than at the screen.
Clinician well-being must be treated as a patient metric because, as Dr. Kevin Pho reminds us, “The key to patient satisfaction is clinician satisfaction.”
Trust is built before, during, and after care, so health systems should own the online narrative with verified information and authentic physician voices.
Listening is the true differentiator: redesign schedules and workflows so clinicians can hear patients and be heard by leaders.
Above all, speak the language of patients by framing every operational choice around what it changes for the person in the room (or on the screen).
Watch the conversation: See Dr. Kevin Pho and Ryan Donohue unpack how to restore human connection in care. Stream the episode now.