Primary Care/Medical Home
"...patient-centered care, in its essence, is about partnerships."
Thomas Bodenheimer and Kevin Grumbach
Improving Primary Care: Strategies and Tools for a Better Practice, 2007
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Collaboration in the clinical encounter |
The principles underlying patient- and family-centered care can serve as a framework for making primary care responsive to the concerns and priorities of all. This approach to health care involves patients and their families as partners in their own care as well as in planning, implementing, and evaluating improvements to the systems of care. Patient- and family-centered care places an emphasis on collaborating with patients and families of all ages, at all levels of care, and in all health care settings. Further, it acknowledges that families, however they are defined, are essential to patients' health and well-being and are allies for quality and safety.
Primary care providers who practice patient- and family-centered care know that high-quality, safe care requires partnerships with patients and family members as well as with other care providers and community members. This approach enhances the quality and experience of care for patients and families and the quality of the work experience for practitioners and staff.
Recommendations and Promising Practices, including Medical Home
NCQA's Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) 2011 is an innovative program for improving primary care. In a set of standards that describe clear and specific criteria, the program gives practices information about organizing care around patients, working in teams and coordinating and tracking care over time.
The primary care setting provides an ideal opportunity for health care providers to work in partnerships with patients and families in developing individual plans of care. Read more.
From Rhetoric to Reality: Achieving Patient-Centered Care
In 1999, the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) established the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation which seeks to advance medical professionalism and physician leadership in quality assessment and improvement. The 2008 ABIM Foundation's Invitational Summer Forum, "From Rhetoric to Reality: Achieving Patient-Centered Care" was designed to promote dialogue and decision-making among health care leaders to address barriers to, and innovations in, achieving patient-centered care.
The Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC)
Founded in 2006, the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC) is dedicated to advancing an effective and efficient health system built on a strong foundation of primary care and the patient-centered medical home (PCMH). The PCPCC achieves its mission through the work of its five Stakeholder Centers, led by dedicated experts and thought leaders from the primary care and medical home sector focused on issues of U.S. health care transformation through delivery reform, payment reform, patient engagement, and employee benefit redesign.
The Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC) is a coalition of more than 1,000 organizations and individuals—employers, consumer and patient/family advocacy groups, patient quality organizations, health plans, labor unions, hospitals, physicians and other health professionals—that works to develop and advance an effective and efficient health system built on a strong foundation of primary care. The Collaborative is dedicated to advancing team-based, comprehensive primary care in parternship with patients and their families and serves as a broad-based national advocacy organization for the primary care patient centered medical home, providing information and networking opportunities to facilitate support for the PCMH.
The Commonwealth Fund
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The Commonwealth Fund launched the Patient-Centered Primary Care Initiative in 2005 to encourage primary care practices and health care systems to redesign the delivery of health care around the needs and priorities of patients. Projects supported by the initiative seek to promote:
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Patients and Families as Advisors in Primary Care
Patients and families are being asked to take an active role in their own health care and engage as partners with health care providers to improve their own health or that of their family members—whether that means enhancing their ability to prevent illness, taking steps to insure health care safety, or improving their skills to self-manage a chronic condition. Read more.
