Policy Points
Current efforts to measure and improve trust in health care focus on changing patients’ attitudes rather than measuring and improving the trustworthiness of health care organizations and systems.
We present a conceptual model to understand and explain the constructs of trust and trustworthiness in the context of health care through the application of existing theories of human behavior.
Developing and publicly reporting measures that can enable patients, particularly from historically marginalized groups, to better assess the trustworthiness of providers is necessary to promote health care equity.