Patient-centered care
Patient-centered care is a healthcare approach that emphasizes a collaborative partnership between healthcare providers and patients. This model prioritizes the patient's perspective, recognizing that patients are often the best judges of their healthcare needs and experiences. By valuing patient input and actively involving patients and their families in care, the aim is to enhance patient satisfaction and outcomes while potentially lowering healthcare costs associated with unnecessary treatments and hospitalizations.
In practice, patient-centered care involves healthcare providers listening to patients, respecting their values, and incorporating patient feedback into the care process. Tools such as online surveys may be used to regularly assess patient perceptions, ensuring that their voices are heard and considered. Moreover, it is essential for healthcare providers to communicate timely and comprehensive information to patients, enabling informed decision-making.
Despite its advantages, the implementation of patient-centered care faces challenges, especially related to existing healthcare reimbursement structures and the trend toward more generalized care providers who may lack established patient relationships. Overall, the model seeks to foster effective communication, empathy, and trust between patients and providers, ultimately aiming for better health outcomes and more efficient use of healthcare resources.
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Patient-centered care
Patient-centered care is an approach to the planning, delivery, and evaluation of health care. It is based on the idea of establishing a mutually beneficial partnership between health care providers and patients. By forging this partnership, patient-centered care is designed to facilitate patient outcomes and experiences while reducing costly or unnecessary diagnostic testing, medications, hospital stays, and physician referrals. The approach is applicable to all provider types and medical specialties. The effectiveness of care in the patient-centered model is assessed through patient consultation and reporting rather than by way of physician-centric tools and standards employed under provider-based health care systems.
Overview
One of the primary tenets of patient-centered care is that patients are the best judges of how well their health care providers are meeting their needs. Recognizing that the patient’s perspective is tied closely to patient outcomes and satisfaction, the patient-centered care model emphasizes the importance of physicians listening to and respecting the values and opinions of their patients and incorporating consideration of those viewpoints into the delivery of care. Toward that end, health care providers practicing patient-centered care typically have systems in place, such as online surveys, to measure patient perceptions on an ongoing basis.
In addition to soliciting information from patients, the model of patient-centered care also requires physicians to provide candid information back to their patients. In other words, the model stipulates that patients should receive timely, accurate, and complete information to be sure they are sufficiently informed and prepared to effectively engage in their own health decisions and care.
Under the patient-centered care model, patients and their families or caregivers are actively encouraged to participate in their own care. More broadly, the model also enables patients and their support network to collaborate with health care leaders and institutions in regard to the development and evaluation of health care policies and programs, design of medical care facilities, and implementation of professional health care education.
By engaging in effective communication, showing empathy, and forging a trusting partnership with their patients, practitioners can not only improve patient satisfaction, but also patient outcomes as well. That is because physicians who educate and accommodate their patients are able to improve patient compliance regarding treatment and disease management. The enhanced compliance and open physician-patient relationship also help to reduce overall health care costs by shrinking the need for expensive prescriptions, medical tests, and hospitalizations arising from potential knowledge gaps and process requirements under the physician-versus-patient model of care.
The widespread availability of patient-centered care is somewhat limited by existing structures of physician practice and reimbursement. For example, many primary care physicians are reimbursed per patient encounter rather than on quality of care, pushing many to emphasize patient volumes at the expense of patient service. At the same time, a trend toward expanding the base of generalist health care providers, such as hospitalists who have no established relationship with the patient, further strays from the basic tenets of patient-centered care.
Bibliography
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