The Relationship of Ethnic, Racial, and Cultural Concordance to Physician-Patient Communication: A Mixed-Methods Systematic Review Protocol

The concept of racial, ethnic, or cultural concordance between a healthcare provider and a patient has emerged as a dimension of the patient-physician relationship that could influence health outcomes for minoritized patients, particularly through differences in the way physicians communicate with patients of various races and ethnicities. However, two decades of study on concordance and physician-patient communication have produced contradictory results. Although existing systematic reviews have addressed race, ethnicity, and culture as influences on medical encounters, only one review, published in 2006, has examined the effects of this concordance across multiple ethnicities, specifically focusing on physician-patient communication. Given the heightened societal awareness of racism and health disparities in recent years, there is a need for a comprehensive review of the current state of knowledge. This review, therefore, will seek to determine how communication patterns differ in ethnically, racially, and culturally concordant versus discordant patient-provider medical encounters, in the process identifying explanatory and outcome variables associated with those differences.