Patient-Centered Care Starts With Patient-Provider Communication

Improving communication between patients and their providers is crucial to reforming the health care system to better meet patients’ needs and improve patient outcomes. Strategies such as shared decision making and patient-centered medical homes, which encourage patients to play an active role in their health care and rely on strong patient-provider relationships, are founded on trust and communication. Yet recent data from the Health Reform Monitoring Survey (HRMS) suggest that providers could be having more conversations with their patients about issues surrounding their health care. Patients who have low incomes and have forgone needed care because they couldn’t afford it are often at risk of having their concerns go unaddressed by providers. In this blog post, we present findings from the HRMS that demonstrate the need for progress in patient-provider communication and suggest strategies for improvement. Patients Rate Their Health Care And Providers Highly But Gaps In Communication Exist In the September 2016 round of the HRMS, most nonelderly adults gave high ratings for the health care they received, and most had high levels of trust in their usual providers. On a scale of 0 to 10, in which 10 indicates complete trust, the median rating for health care and for trust in one’s provider was 7–8. The most common response for provider trust was 9–10 (Exhibit 1), but almost one-third of adults from minority racial/ethnic backgrounds rated their trust in thei...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Health Professionals Organization and Delivery Quality Health Reform Monitoring Survey patient-centered care patient-provider communication Source Type: blogs