Restorative Practice in Healthcare: Case Studies from Academic Medicine

Every patient encounter is an opportunity to build trust with a human connection focused on an opportunity for trust building. Current US healthcare systems often ignore this opportunity, and the fact the patient is human (not a list of body parts and systems), as are their family, friends, and caregivers. On the clinical side, the entire healthcare team, and the many who support them, are also human. When training the clinicians of the future, the learners and teams that teach are similarly human. Distilling each of these spaces into transactions ignores the power and promise of building transformation via trust, collaboration, and curiosity. Especially in a world where we appear to be at the cusp of technological innovations such as Artificial Intelligence in healthcare, where the transactional holds the promise of being potentially done by machines and the transformative is owned by the human clinicians for a world of augmented intelligence.