Patient-centered care about more than just financial gains

by Thomas Dahlborg This week my intention was to follow up my recent post highlighting kindness, compassion and patient-centered care with additional positive signs of a healthcare transformation where patients and families are engaged, care teams are healthy and whole and positioned to honor their patients, and patient preferences, patient safety and healthcare outcomes are all being optimized. And then two things happened. The first was a discussion within the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWFJ) Leadership Network LinkedIn forum. I asked a question relative to patient engagement, tools, lessons learned and best practices, and during the ensuing interchange an individual with much passion and who is also part of a team doing great work in this area used the phrase "... engagement and activation and collaboration have definitely reached buzzword status." That got me thinking. A buzzword--could it be that patient-centered care was simply "fashionable" at this particular time and that in actuality there is no longevity to this movement? Is patient-centered care simply another flavor of the month? Of course not, I thought. Then I learned of a prestigious network of physicians seeking to increase its market share in a large metropolitan area and their strategy to do so was "patient-centeredness," which became strictly a means to an end to generate revenue via the quality contracts in place and soon to be negotiated. And how the scores became the end goal and not the liv...
Source: hospital impact - Category: Health Managers Authors: Source Type: blogs