Apr 7 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)

We’d love to hear from you on LinkedIn or Twitter on this Thought Question:

What policy in place at your organization could be rolled back today given its lack of empathy for patients?

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