MDS Alert

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

Patient-centered care is one of the top 10 recommendations made by the Institute of Medicine in its September 2012 report, "Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America." Read on for their specific strategies.

"Recommendation 4: Patient-Centered Care: Involve patients and families in decision 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, including individual care decisions, health system learning and improvement activities, and community-based interventions to promote health.

Strategies for progress toward this goal:

Patient’s should expect to be offered full participation in their own care and health and encouraged to partner, according to their preference, 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.

Health care delivery organizations, including programs operated by the DoD, VHA, and Health Resources and Services Administration, should monitor and assess patient perspectives and use the insights thus gained 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.

AHRQ, partnering with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), other payers, and stakeholder organizations, should 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.

CMS and other public and private payers should promote and measure patient-centered care through payment models, contacting policies, and public reporting programs.

Digital technology developers and health product innovators should develop tools to assist individuals in managing their health and health care, in addition to providing patient supports in new forms of communities."

Source: Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America. Recommendations September 2012. For more information visit www.iom.edu/bestcare.