What Is Person-Centered Care? Overview and FAQ

Person-centered care refers to an approach that prioritizes a patient’s individual needs, preferences, and values. Medical protocols guide healthcare providers in diagnosing and treating various types of health conditions. By following best practices, providers work toward achieving the best possible patient outcomes. But what happens when they deviate from condition-based care and start considering a patient’s bigger life picture? Lives change.

In this article, we cover what it means to provide care that is focused on the individual at your facility, answer frequently asked questions about this approach, and explore realistic care examples across different healthcare settings.

What Is Person-Centered Care?

This model of care delivery emphasizes patient engagement and shared decision-making. It encourages patients to actively participate in their care, set health goals, and collaborate with their healthcare team to achieve meaningful outcomes over time.

Delivering care that is person-centered can improve patient satisfaction, treatment outcomes, and the overall quality of care. It can be applied in healthcare settings such as:

• Hospitals
• Ambulatory care centers
• Primary care clinics
• Long-term care facilities
• Mental health treatment centers

How Is Patient-Centered Care Related to the Social Determinants of Health?

The person focused care philosophy gives providers a framework for responding to the non-medical factors that affect a patient’s life. It recognizes that a person’s health is influenced by their socioeconomic status, education, access to care, living situation, and community — factors known as the social determinants of health.

By recognizing and addressing the social determinants, healthcare providers can deliver comprehensive care that improves overall well-being and positive health outcomes for individuals.

What Is the Key to Providing Person-Centered Care?

The essential component of the person-centered approach is the placement of the patient at the center of the care team. The patient is treated as the expert with regards to their experience and values. This represents a fundamental paradigm shift away from previous models, which often treated the provider as the expert and authority, and focused on the disease more than the person experiencing it.

How Can Providers Integrate This Model in Practice?

While this individualized theory of care emphasizes the patient as the expert, it can be challenging for providers to act on — especially if we’ve been trained otherwise. As care providers working to integrate this approach, we must be mindful of our own biases and beliefs and the ways we try to exert these over patients.

There are additional barriers to consider as well. It may be difficult to build trust with patients to facilitate honest communication. It can also be very challenging for patients and providers to overcome differences in the perception of the problem and desired outcomes.

With these barriers in mind, it may be helpful to investigate practical steps for using this model of caregiving, to see how they may apply to your practice and the patients you serve. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recommends integrating this approach as part of a value-based care model. According to CMS, the person focused approach includes five components. Below, we’ll provide more detail and go over an example for each element.

1. Patients’ Goals, Preferences, and Values

Healthcare providers collaborate with patients by considering the personal preferences and emotional factors that contribute to their well-being. Patients are viewed as active participants in their care who have a right to make informed health decisions. By prioritizing autonomy, providers build a trusting and empowered relationship with patients.

Example: An older adult sees an oncologist for a new cancer diagnosis. The patient shares his goals for the near future, which include attending his daughter’s wedding. Together, he and the oncologist select a treatment plan that allows him to maximize his quality of life so he can walk his daughter down the aisle.

2. Patient-Reported Outcomes

In conventional medicine, objective data like vital signs and lab values help healthcare providers measure an individual’s response to medical treatment. With person-focused care, patient-reported outcomes are taken into account as well. This concept encourages patients to actively participate in their care and create goals for their individualized care plan.

Example: A patient with chronic liver disease discusses ongoing depression with their primary provider. The provider creates a “homework assignment” for mood-boosting activities to work on between appointments. At the next appointment, the patient evaluates their depression symptoms using a self-reporting questionnaire.

3. Care Collaboration Across Healthcare Settings

A patient-centered approach to care supports a culture of safety by integrating care across healthcare settings. It allows providers to access patient information to provide individualized care — and avoid errors during care transitions. It also allows caregivers to integrate a patient’s individual preferences, such as religious or cultural practices.

Example: A patient is directly admitted to the hospital for surgery from a primary care office. He informs the care team that due his religious beliefs he does not want any blood transfusions during the course of treatment. The primary care nurse practitioner places information in the chart about the patient’s decision to refuse blood products. The hospital team honors this request when accepting the patient for surgery.

Person-centered care examples like this, which touch on the patient’s beliefs and values, are a good reminder of the intersection between the patient-centric model and culturally congruent care.

4. Complex and Chronic Condition Management

Patients with complex and chronic diseases often see multiple healthcare providers in their lifetime. An individualized care approach allows providers to collaborate across specialties while keeping the main focus on the patient’s holistic well-being.

Example: A patient with a history of diabetes, obesity, and kidney failure is hospitalized for a hypertensive crisis. A member of the nursing staff, who knows the patient well, requests a low-sodium diet from the kitchen and places signage throughout the room to avoid blood pressures and venipuncture in the left arm due to the presence of a dialysis fistula.

5. Long-Term Relationship Building

One of the key goals of this newer approach to care is to establish trusting long-term relationships between patients and providers. To be successful, providers must be flexible and adapt to a person’s changing needs or preferences over time. Providers encourage feedback so they can continuously improve patient care. It also considers emerging issues for older adults, such as creating a care plan that includes their caregiver in decision-making.

Example: An older adult is the primary caregiver for a parent with advanced dementia. At a primary care appointment, the provider creates a care plan that includes respite care and other resources for the family caregiver.

Seeking More Tips on Best Practice Care?

Part of a commitment to quality healthcare is the integration of person-centered care in nursing and advanced practice environments. Looking for more ways to promote best practices? We’re here to help, with valuable healthcare industry insights and guides that are designed to help you enhance the quality of care at your facility.