Yale Healthcare Conference - Recap: Executive Panel
Executive Panel on Patient-Centeredness
A distinguished group of speakers, including Robert Galvin, Jahangir Mohammed, Adrienne Boissy, and Donald M. Berwick, gave an impassioned overview of common barriers to patient-centered care and recommendations to improve.
Key takeaway:
True patient-centered care is Empathy Operationalized. We must move the paradigm from patient centeredness to person or even relationship centeredness.
Topics of note:
Problems to solve for in healthcare, more often than not, are a manifestation of something amiss foundationally. We’ve heard about solving to the problem, but how about shifting our language and focus to solving to the root cause?
Examples of non-patient-centered care abound: priority parking for physicians, 9-5 Mon-Fri healthcare availability, limitations to inpatient visiting hours.
Info, Access, Culture and Measurement barriers should be analyzed when making healthcare decisions.
Other compelling nuggets:
“Have the benefit of a beginner’s mind.” Jahangir, Mohammed, Founder, Twin Health
Donald Berwick, Faculty, Harvard Medical School:
We need to “design systems that are adaptive to the needs of the individual patient up to the last step.” An example: patients should have the ability to personalize lab result release timeframes (even for cancer and genetics if the patient so desires).
“Communities are asking to take the wheel, and they should.” This means that providers and payers need to learn how to adapt to this change – be great partners and community anchors.
“In the U.S., we haven’t discovered solidarity [in healthcare] yet.”
“RVU stuff is just plain in our way.”
Several great quotes of note from Adrienne Boissy, CMO, Qualtrics:
“We all behave very differently in relationships.”
“Patients want to know are they cared about, are they safe, is this easy.”
“Patients experience pain in healthcare as lack of access on the front end, delays throughout the care process, and billing issues on the back end.”
“Access is a health imperative.”
“Treat people as human beings.”
“Patients need to be part of the team.”
How do we get our staff to care about and weave patient-centeredness into all decisions?
At Cleveland Clinic they have “The Pause.” The names of all patients who passed away the previously day are read, a moment of silence is honored, and decision makers then get to work. Powerful stuff.
“Systems are perfectly designed to produce the results that they do.” – Robert S. Galvin, CEO, Equity Healthcare (EH)