The provider trust gap: How to select health plans that build real doctor-patient relationships

Read Time

5 Minutes

Written by

Team Curative

Featured Insights by

Dr. Lillian Holloway, MD, FAAFP

Published

Oct 8, 2025

Trust in doctors has plummeted in the past few years, going from 71.5% in April 2020 to 40.1% in January 2024.

That’s a real problem.

As a benefits leader, you want to foster genuine provider-patient trust — and that means you need to carefully look at and select the right health plans.

The usual metrics — network size and cost — skip over relationship-building, but trusting relationships are what actually drive employee health outcomes and ROI.

Our Medical Director Dr. Lillian Holloway, MD, FAAFP – who also helps lead and practices with Curative Primary Care – understands both sides of the provider-patient trust equation. As a family medicine physician at Cook County Health, she witnessed how system design can either enable or destroy therapeutic relationships.

Now, at Curative, she redesigns care delivery to make sure those relationships stay strong over time.

In her experience, she’s learned that while effective primary care requires trust between providers and patients, most health plans don’t let that trust build (think 15-minute visits and provider churn).

Below, Dr. Holloway shares her strategy for selecting plans that protect and nurture provider-patient relationships, which leads to dramatic improvements in employee health outcomes and reduced total health care costs.

Why your employees don’t trust their doctors

Traditional insurance speak blames patients for "non-compliance" all the time — but really, the way they structure care delivery is the problem. Think of your last too-quick doctor’s appointment.

"As a patient, it's hard for me to trust you if you’re running a patient factory,” Dr. Holloway says. “15 minutes? I cannot be summed up in 15 minutes."

Benefits teams should look for a plan that covers clinicians that don't treat appointments like a factory line. It's easy to just look at the size of the network and discounts, but clinicians and clinical models that promote relationship-building should be considered.

"In primary care, the number one thing that we do every day is build trust,” Dr. Holloway says. “If you're not doing that, you're not treating someone."

Health is high-stakes, and the way doctors treat patients can have a lasting effect. Dr. Holloway’s own father had a bad experience with an ER doctor who treated him as though he was just looking for drugs.

After that, his mindset shifted. "Throughout his cancer journey, he almost never took meds, which meant he suffered, which meant he couldn't spend as much time with me or my family," Dr. Holloway says.

When your health plan forces providers to think of visits as transactional, you might see some of those moments. And they destroy trust. When employees don’t trust their care providers, they might delay care and go untreated, which can lead to catastrophic claims.

How to evaluate health plans through the lens of trust

Visit lengths matter. In traditional plans, you might see 15-minute slots where doctors get paid based on filling out a checklist. Those plans destroy trust.

That’s why Dr. Holloway’s approach at Curative is more nuanced.

"We get 30 minutes for the initial visit, and then the follow-up is based on the needs of the provider and the patient," Dr. Holloway says. “Trust is probably 70% of my day — I can throw a prescription at someone, but that's not going to cure their heart disease if they don't take it or if they don't understand why they should take it."

She suggests keeping these four pillars in mind when you’re selecting a plan:

Provider Continuity Features: Plans that keep employees with the same provider over years
Relationship Assessment: Plans that ask "Do you have someone you can trust?" not just "Who's your PCP?"
Time Investment Structure: Plans that fund extended visits, or follow-up visits, for relationship building
Support Infrastructure: Plans that offer non-clinical navigation, like Curative’s Care Navigators, to retain clinical time for trust-building

Dr. Holloway also advises evaluating plans based on provider retention rates, not just network size. The goal should be for your employees to know their doctors — both because they stick around and because the plan has a focus on building bonds between doctor and patient.

When you ask, “Who’s your primary care doctor?” they should be able to answer with a name.

Dr. Holloway has seen these direct primary care models result in better outcomes specifically because they protect provider time for relationship-building.

Five ways to evaluate if a health plan has trust-building potential

1. Time: A non-negotiable foundation

For a visit, 15 minutes isn't enough. “More of us need to be honest and say that, because otherwise, we're scratching our heads in the richest country of the world, like, ‘Why can't we get these numbers right?’" Dr. Holloway says. Evaluate potential plans on their average primary care visit length — anything under 20 minutes should get crossed out.

2. Continuity: The compound interest of health care

When plans maintain relationships over the years, ROI is exponentially better. That’s because trust is everything. "If you don't trust me, why would you trust that a mammogram's a good choice? If you don't trust me, then why would you take that medication? Why would you come back to see me?" Dr. Holloway asks.

3. Patient agency: The power of choice

Select a plan where providers have the flexibility to meet patients where they are instead of forcing compliance. They should be able to ask about the patient’s goals, not just run through predetermined questions.

4. Navigation: The trust multiplier

Help moving through the care system is key, and that non-clinical support can free up providers to focus more on relationship-building. At Curative, Care Navigators take on logistics with patients so doctors can focus on baseline visits and specific health needs.

5. Flexibility: Relationships over rigidity

Opt for plans that allow a variable visit frequency depending on what the patient needs. That helps strengthen relationships — it’s more personal than a rigid schedule. "Some people say, ‘I'll see you again in 3 months, or in 6 months, or in a year,’” Dr. Holloway says. “Other people... we're going to have to see each other every week for a while."

When benefits leaders are picking health plans, they should put relationship-building features first if they want a healthier workforce that sticks around. That means looking for features like extended visit times, provider continuity, and flexible care delivery instead of homing in on network size and cost alone. When you choose plans that foster real health care provider-patient trust, employees get better care and employers see better results.