Home Health & Hospice Week

Follow these 5 strategies to achieve the best care at lower cost.

If you want your patient outcomes to be the best they can be, you’ll need to figure out how to tailor care to your patients’ needs and abilities.

Patient-centered care is one of the top 10 recommendations made by the Institute of Medi-cine in a recent report on “Best Care at Lower Cost.”

The IOM urges providers to “involve patients and families in decisions regarding health and health care, tailored to fit their preferences.” Patients and families should be given the opportunity to be fully engaged participants at all levels, in-cluding individual care decisions, health system learning and improvement activities, and community-based interventions to promote health.

Consider these strategies the IOM suggests for progress toward this goal:

Offer patients full participation in their own care and health and encourage them to partner with clinicians in fulfilling those expectations.

Clinicians should employ high-quality, reliable tools and skills for informed shared decision making with patients and families, tailored to clinical needs, patient goals, social circumstances, and the degree of control patients prefer.

Monitor and assess patient perspectives and use the insights to improve care processes; establish patient portals to facilitate data sharing and communication among clinicians, patients, and families; and make high-quality reliable tools available for shared decision making with patients at different levels of health literacy.

Support the development and testing of an accurate and reliable core set of measures of patient-centeredness for consistent use across the heath care system.

Use digital technology and other health products to assist individuals in managing their health and health care, in addition to providing patient supports in new forms of communities.

Ahead: Expect to see patient outcomes become even more important. The IOM wants the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and other payers to promote and measure patient-centered care through payment models, contracting policies, and public reporting programs.

Note: Institute of Medicine of the National Academies’ Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America. Recommendations September 2012 is at www.iom. edu/bestcare.