{"id":5109,"date":"2010-03-12T14:22:43","date_gmt":"2010-03-12T19:22:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pmedicine.org\/epatients\/?p=5109"},"modified":"2010-03-13T08:22:57","modified_gmt":"2010-03-13T13:22:57","slug":"lets-write-an-im-patient-centered-crap-detector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/participatorymedicine.org\/epatients\/2010\/03\/lets-write-an-im-patient-centered-crap-detector.html","title":{"rendered":"Is Your Healthcare Practice Patient-centered?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I was at a monthly TelePresence<\/a> meeting of the Person Centered Health<\/a> initiative, a group that started in Canada that’s closely aligned with the Society for Participatory Medicine<\/a>. At this meeting, some expressed concern that the memes of \u201cperson-centered health,\u201d \u201cpatient-centered healthcare,\u201d \u201cparticipatory medicine,\u201d and the like are becoming so overused as to become meaningless. That is, practices and healthcare organizations are claiming to espouse these principles, when in reality they don\u2019t practice that way. Put another way, they talk the talk but don\u2019t walk the walk.<\/p>\n

That’s just plain wrong. You shouldn’t get away with pretending to be patient-centered, any more than you should get away with pretending to be in love. So let’s get specific.<\/p>\n

My view is that shifting to patient-centered care entails cultural change, which is difficult. Getting there requires a multi-faceted approach. Part of this involves spreading the meme, but this must be followed by education of all stakeholders in the healthcare system. One way to accomplish this is by providing concrete examples (\u201cyou know your practice is participatory if\u2026”). Then we\u2019ll be able to measure practices against this list of attributes.<\/p>\n

Let’s crowd-source it. How do you <\/em>separate the participatory from\u00a0 “empty words” people? Here is my starting list of the most important attributes.<\/p>\n