Patient-Centered Care - Healthcare's New Buzzword

The latest trend in the health care industry is patient-centered care. Patient-centered care isn't just a buzzword. It's what your patients demand. But by recreating your healthcare organization to put your patients at the center of everything you do can improve each aspect of your business.

In patient-centered care, a person's specific health needs and desired health needs, and desired health outcomes are the driving force behind all health care decisions and quality measurements. Patients are now partners with their doctors in their health care journey and doctors not only treat them from a clinical perspective but also mental, spiritual, emotional, and social perspective.

Patients both desire and require to be involved at every level of their healthcare journey. Within the last decade, there's been a trend toward patient involvement with the broad terms 'patient engagement' and 'patient centered'. Over the last few years, this term has received huge attention.

Now the definition of patient care is expanded. The health sector sees it as clinical care as well as patient experience and patient engagement, including how encounters stack up to patient's expectations from other consumer-facing businesses and, consequently, whether patients view their care as worth the high price tag.

What is Patient-Centered Care?

Patient-centered care goes beyond the interactions between patients and doctors. It's the complete experience, from the moment a patient sets up a follow-up appointment. As consumers become patients, they demand more from the healthcare experience through comfortable, quick, patient-centric touchpoints and technologies. Now patients are putting their preferences in their mind while deciding where to seek care, and they aren't always going to big-box hospitals.

Effective patient care involves two important things: the capability to get insights into patient behaviors and requirements while maintaining patient privacy, and the capability to get in touch in real-time about their behavior and needs as they change.

Technology is what can help you to stay a step ahead of your patient and achieve an integrated journey. A robust EHR system that covers important healthcare data tied with marketing automation and tracking can give you the overall view of your patient that is important in knowing how to interact with them. Contributions from the patient and caregiver community can provide important input into a wide variety of aspects within research, healthcare, and commercial concerns.

Benefits of Patient-Centered Care, Powered by Technology

Summary

Patient involvement is slowly changing all facets of the healthcare industry. From interaction with healthcare professionals to various research efforts and medical developments. The development of a patient-centered method is slowly enabling more patients to be involved in their own medical decisions. By having more treatment options, broadening access to medical care, and getting better patient outcomes with good quality of life – these all should be central to the heart of medical care, scientific inquiry, and advocacy efforts. Collaboration and connection between healthcare professionals and patients are significant to share information and experiences that foster advancements in the rare disease arena, yet time and resources need to be better optimized to allow for opportunities to be more fully captured. Healthcare workers, specialists, medical companies, and patient associations need to collaborate to provide proper information about the purposes of research and treatment options to better treat the patients. We must understand that there is no improvement without research and that without patient participation in the healthcare journey, there can be no new knowledge to serve future patients.