New Roles and Rules for Patient-Centered Care

Abstract

Patient-centered care was anointed one of six aims for US health care in a 2001 Institute of Medicine report that simultaneously unfurled a long list of its defining traits. The term encompassed qualities of compassion, empathy and responsiveness to the needs, values and expressed preferences of the individual patient while addressing technical care and interpersonal interactions within a healing relationship. A dozen years later, a 2013 IOM workshop sounded a strikingly different note. It recommended strategies and policies at multiple levels to advance patients, in partnership with providers, as leaders and drivers of care delivery improvement through the protected use of clinical data, informed, shared decisions and value improvement.