Recently there has been a rebirth of the notion of relationship-centered care as a meaningful way of creating real and positive outcomes, utilizing all the tools available to the entire care team (including you, the patient).  This November issue of our newsletter offers some insights, from a varied set of contributors, as to why this is so important right now.  First, here is a take on how we got here.

Healthcare 1.0:  Those of us who are a “certain age” know this well.  Quite simply, your doctor was in charge. You did what he (most of the time it was a he) told you to do. When you got sick, you made a phone call and waited patiently for the appointment, then waited patiently in the waiting room, then waited patiently in the exam room, then were spoken to in a paternalistic manner. And you left feeling like you may have understood 20% of what was said in there, but you trusted your doctor, your hospital system, your medication. You were ‘made better’ and you had little or nothing to do with it except to show up and follow orders.

Healthcare 2.0:  Then things changed. You became the “center” of your care.  You started paying more for it, your doctor’s relationship changed because she or he was now focused on what billing code to use, what data to input into something called an electronic health record (that you couldn’t get access to), your visit with your doctor seemed to be shorter, and your insurance company seemed to loom large over everything.  And you had choices – primary care at the pharmacy, urgent care, online patient communities, and a bunch of new medications that seemed to take care of things you never even heard of.  Like walking through the cereal aisle at your grocery store and making a choice within 15 minutes – good luck!

Healthcare 3.0:  If you are an optimist, this is the best time, the revitalization.  You now have the opportunity to have a voice (the empowered patient), to gain access (i.e. Open Notes), to connect easily (mhealth, online scheduling and more), to make very important healthcare decisions based on value (what a concept!), and to work with everyone on your healthcare “team” – this is relationship-centered care.   Any good team working together shares risk, information, has empathy, leverages all tools available and is focused on a single goal: your personal health.  This is personalized medicine, this is Healthcare 3.0, this is relationship-centered care.

Jonathan Bush and others say it better here.  In the words of Dr. Zubin Damania, “Health 3.0 restores the human relationship at the heart of healing while bolstering it with a team that revolves around the patient while supporting each other as fellow caregivers. What emerges is vastly greater than the sum of the parts.”

A 2014 perspective in Healthcare by Shantanu Nundy and John Oswald articulates the value of relationship-centered care to population health management. Yet there is still too much along the lines of physician burnout, like this.

With the support of the Society for Participatory Medicine, I reached out and gathered input from patients, physicians, nurse practitioners, healthcare societies, insurance companies, healthcare systems and more, to create collaborative innovation around relationship-centered care.  We have published what we think is a highly readable and useable collection of content. Enjoy, react and please share through your own networks, so that we continue to grow the voice of the Society for Preventative Medicine.

Thank you,

Dave Dolton