Contextualizing Patient-Centered Care to Fulfill Its Promise of Better Health Outcomes: Beyond Who, What, and Why

摘要

Efforts to improve patient outcomes have focused, in large part, on technical processes of health care, which are ideally informed by the most up-to-date evidence on effective care practices. Technical quality is often viewed as the "science" of medicine as opposed to its "art," which involves such less tangible and potentially harder-to-capture aspects of care as the interpersonal and cognitive processes underlying patient-physician communication and decision making. Yet, as Donabedian said more than 2 decades ago, "The interpersonal process is the vehicle by which technical care is implemented and on which its success depends" (1). Therefore, to achieve desired health outcomes, it is essential to focus on optimizing both the technical and the interpersonal processes in care (1).