What is Patient-Centered Care, and What Could It Become?

Definitions of patient-centered care vary but, the way I see it, patient-centered care goes beyond the physical health of the patient. It encompasses every aspect of their disease journey and their needs that arise from it, namely the patient’s mental, emotional, and physical needs. It requires a partnership approach to treatment and emphasizes collaboration among health practitioners, patients, and caregivers. Every level of care is designed with the patient’s overall experience in mind. 

Patient centricity manifests in three major levels of patient care: the practitioner level, the hospital management level, and the treatment level. All these levels must function both independently and in tandem to achieve true patient centricity. 

Practitioners as Partners

For a physician to approach care in a truly patient-centered way requires two major things: empathy, and a focus on the patient’s overall experience. 

Empathy may seem obvious, yet, it continues to be an elusive component of patient-physician interactions. A successful patient-practitioner relationship – one that centers the patient – is approached as a partnership, and empathy and trust are the cornerstones of such a relationship. When you lead with empathy, your ability to understand the root of a patient’s issue grows substantially, which allows you to focus on the issues the patient is most concerned with. 

When a patient presents general symptoms like an ongoing stomachache or headache, a diagnosis can be elusive. Finding the right diagnosis requires multiple tests and consultations in a game of ruling out possibilities. In a patient-centric care model, the physician and care team are balancing the diagnosis with management of the patient’s symptoms while considering other aspects of overall patient care, such as the patient’s mental health, unfamiliarity with the diagnostic process and ability to live their day-to-day life. 

By talking openly about a patient’s concerns, both patient, caregiver and practitioner can work as a team to develop a care plan that the patient can realistically adhere to and feel good about following. This understanding comes only from a patient-practitioner relationship built on trust, communication, and empathy. Healthcare is, for many, an intimidating and confusing experience. Patients should feel cared for and listened to by their practitioners. 

Collaborative Care is Better Care

Patient-centered care requires a great deal of collaboration, not only with the patient, but also with other health practitioners and professionals. A primary care physician (PCP) won’t personally handle every single aspect of a patient’s care. In order to receive well-rounded care, patients often need access to a variety of specialists. It is, however, the PCP’s role to collaborate with those specialists to ensure that the patient is receiving seamless, coordinated care. 

Cancer care, for instance, is not just treatment of the tumor – in a multidisciplinary care setting, from the moment a patient is diagnosed, they meet with a team of professionals who are going to manage their care. Take, for example, a patient recently diagnosed with breast cancer. Their treatment will require them to interact with surgeons, medical and radiation oncologists, diagnostic imaging experts, pathologists, nurses of various disciplines and specialties, and perhaps even plastic surgeons – at the very least. Without intentional collaboration among these experts, however, their valuable opinions and perspectives will be excluded when developing a comprehensive treatment plan. Thus, the multidisciplinary team is born: capitalizing on the expertise of every specialist involved, these collaborative care teams have been proven to be a more effective approach to patient care. 

Continuity of care is also an important aspect of maintaining a patient-centered approach. Patients often experience an entirely new set of caregivers when moving from acute to subacute care settings. Managing care from one team to the next is difficult, and patients can feel abandoned by their initial caregivers if this transition is mismanaged. There are several different approaches to addressing this issue. One of the most effective is assigning nurses to patients, so they continue along the acute-to-subacute journey with them, managing their care, ensuring continuity, and building communication and trust with the patient. 

Inclusive Clinical Trial Design

Beyond a simple hospital visit, there are many other ways to center patients in healthcare. Miami Cancer Institute, for instance, supports and establishes clinical trials in addition to its patient care. We collaborate with patients when designing our clinical trials to ensure that the study is an accessible and comfortable experience for those involved. 

Our patient-centered approach to our clinical trials also emphasizes diversity. Recent reports have shown that racial and ethnic minorities continue to be excluded from clinical trials. In 2020, 75% of all clinical trial participants for treatments approved by the FDA that year were white, yet only 60% of the United States population is white. By ensuring that a broad range of ethnicities, genders, and genetic backgrounds are represented in our clinical trials, we are delivering results that have the potential to benefit a wider range of patients. Clinical trials have the potential to inform treatments: as healthcare providers, we must ensure that all treatments are tailored to the patients they are meant for. 

These changes will not come from a simple shift in mindset. Entire systems and cultures must be intentionally reimagined to achieve a truly patient-centric health system. We are seeing these aspects of care achieving success within their individual levels of healthcare – now, we need to see all the pieces come together. Healthcare that partners with patients, leads with empathetic care, functions within streamlined systems that relieve pressure on patients, and delivers results to all patients, is healthcare that truly centers the patient’s needs at every level. Because who else is healthcare for, if not the patients?