Articles
What is Patient-centred care? (4)
- August 30, 2021
- Posted by: mghalandari
- Category: Definition Digital health
If the national health system infrastructure is underdeveloped and a public health policy is not provided, the attractive concept of patient-centred care represents rhetoric rather than reality. Undoubtedly, patient- or people-centred care is mainly determined by the characteristics and behaviours of patient and health care providers. But these are affected by the environment in which a health care organization operates. Eventually, patients, health care providers and health care organizations can be strongly influenced by the infrastructure of the national health system and the health policies derived from it.
Therefore, the absence of systematic development and support of a national health system often results in only anecdotal and fragmented examples of patient centered care at individual provider level. Patient-centred care has recently been regarded as an essential aim of a national health system. However, essential aims of a national health system have multiple dimensions that are sometimes contradictory and always context-sensitive. This means that although it is a fundamental element, patient-centred care should be highlighted from the perspective of the entire national health system.
Patient-centred health information systems
From the perspective of patient-centred care, a health information system and supportive information technology must exhibit the following characteristics:
- shared decision-making;
- patient–provider communication;
- personal longitudinal health records; and
- integration of patient information across different areas of care.
Among these characteristics, the centerpiece of the system would be integrating health information about patients and providers that was diff used across diverse organizations, particularly from the health-system perspective. Above all, seamless information transition will be facilitated by efficient management of the generated information through publicly funded health care utilization, often systematically governed by the public sector.
The potential value of public health insurance, which often involves collecting and storing information nationwide, should be considered. From the initial design and implementation of public health insurance, how and what information should be generated and managed must be determined.
challenges from patients, health care organizations and health systems are not dealt with adequately, the attractiveness of patient-centredness will simply represent rhetoric. Above all, the environment of care is becoming more specialized and oriented towards high technology. The strengthening role of the private sector is hampering the adoption of patient-centred care due to its focus on profit-making. Even adopting strong measures to improve patient-centredness, such as the public release of quality information or P4P, could become a battlefield of providers heavily armed with high-technology services for profit-making, without empowering people and patients.
The above considerations indicate that patient-centred care should be approached using multidimensional strategies. These could range from empowering individual patients to changing the entire health system. The strategy of making the health system more favorable to patient-centred care
should have the highest priority. This is because patients and providers are becoming more tied to the system in terms of the determinants of behavior, including economic incentives. Future discussions should therefore attempt to determine how best to change the system in this direction.