In July 2026, health care leaders, clinicians, and scholars gathered to examine the forces driving public dissatisfaction with American health care and explore how medical professionalism can help strengthen trust, restore professional agency, and address the challenges facing medicine today.
Participants identified four categories of “footholds” that can help clinicians and others across health care navigate these pressures and deliver care aligned with their professional values:
- Protecting human relationships by preserving meaningful clinician-patient connections
- Strengthening professional agency by enabling clinicians to exercise independent judgment
- Ensuring institutional and organizational accountability for supporting professionalism and justice
- Cultivating shared responsibility and collaboration across organizations and sectors
Read the Forum background and summary papers to explore the ideas that framed our conversations and the insights that emerged from them:
Watch the 2026 Forum
Explore recordings from the 2026 ABIM Foundation Forum, Footholds to Advance Trust: Professionalism’s Path Forward, to hear speakers examine trust and medical professionalism from different perspectives – from patient autonomy and institutional trustworthiness to artificial intelligence, affordability, collaboration, and community engagement.
Professionalism When Trust is Fragile
Rachael Bedard, MD, an internist, geriatrician, and palliative care physician who practices at NYC Health + Hospitals and is a contributing writer for The New York Times, explored what it means to build trust with people who feel disconnected from or ignored by the medical establishment. She drew from her experience providing medical care for the sickest incarcerated patients at New York City’s Rikers Island jail during the COVID-19 pandemic and presented lessons she learned about trust, autonomy, and the role of medicine that apply more broadly, including to adherents of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement.
Hard Truths on the Path to Rebuilding Trust
Brinda Adhikari, BA, MacKenzie Isaac, MSc, MA, and Katelyn Jetelina, PhD, MPH, brought perspectives from journalism, health equity, and public health communication to a conversation about the forces shaping trust and mistrust in health care and what it will take to rebuild trust. Their conversation explored how affordability, negative experiences with the health care system, trauma, misinformation, and changing expectations about health information affect trust – and why listening to and understanding people’s experiences matters.
Institutional Legitimacy and Trust
Margaret Levi, PhD, professor emerita and senior fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at Stanford University, explored the intersection of professionalism, trust, and trustworthiness at the organizational level. She examined what makes institutions worthy of trust and the role that fairness, accountability, and institutional structures play in earning and sustaining it.
Trustworthy Expertise and Clinical Judgment in an Age of AI
Robert Wachter, MD, professor and chair of the UCSF Department of Medicine, explored how artificial intelligence could reshape physician agency, clinical judgment, and trust. He considered both AI’s potential to improve care and the changes to clinical work, education, governance, and the physician’s role that will be necessary to realize that potential.
Footholds to Advance Trust
Three speakers shared different perspectives on how health care can earn and sustain trust through affordability, collaboration, and meaningful engagement with communities:
- Natalie Davis, MA, founder and CEO at United States of Care, shared findings based on her organization’s engagement with roughly 30,000 people across the United States, highlighting deep and increasingly visceral frustration with the health care system and a growing perception that financial interests and profits influence decisions about care.
- Keegan Warren, JD, LLM, executive director of the Institute for Healthcare Access at Texas A&M University, focused on the delivery of care and the power of collaboration. She said that trust in health care delivery is built – or depleted – through every interaction, with positive interactions serving as “deposits” in a patient’s “trust account.”
- Panagis Galiatsatos, MD, MHS, associate professor of medicine and oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, emphasized that building medicine as a public trust begins with a simple but powerful commitment: showing up consistently in the communities health systems serve.
Closing Reflections
Paul Starr, PhD, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, brought a historical perspective to professionalism and its challenges in the Forum’s closing address. He examined how trust in medicine and science has changed over time and considered the forces challenging professional authority today, including political polarization, commercialization, and artificial intelligence.
Continuing the Conversation
The 2026 Forum was one part of the ABIM Foundation’s ongoing work to explore how medical professionalism can strengthen trust and improve care. Sign up for our newsletter to receive new research, perspectives, events, and resources related to medical professionalism and trust.
