Building a research community focused on trust in health care

Last year, the ABIM Foundation and AcademyHealth announced a collaborative effort focused on rebuilding trust in health care. Part of the Foundation’s Building Trust initiative, the effort aims to advance research about what creates or inhibits trust among various health care stakeholders and which strategies are effective to build and rebuild trust.

The Foundation and AcademyHealth spent much of last year exploring the evidence base for building trust in health care. We first needed to find out where gaps in trust research existed. We led a stakeholder meeting on trust research attended by approximately 70 researchers, clinicians, patients, and funders. Following the meeting we outlined 10 key areas of interest for research on advancing trust at the organizational, clinician, and patient and community levels. We also reviewed recently funded grants to further identify areas of current research. This marked the beginning of our efforts to build a research community.

Now, we hope to coordinate disparate efforts, facilitate learning, and spur new research on building trust in health care by officially establishing such a multidisciplinary community.

The Research Community on Trust will bring together researchers and other stakeholders – clinicians, patients, health system leaders, payers, policymakers, and funders – who are interested in trust and trust-related issues. It will also enable researchers to connect and share with each other, and with other stakeholders who are critical to research development, dissemination and implementation.

If you are interested in learning more about the Research Community on Trust, please email info@buildingtrust.org.