Efforts to create a team approach to patient-centered health care have support in the Murfreesboro medical community.
Timm Glover, vice president of mission integration at Middle Tennessee Medical Center, said, “We have to remember the persons we are serving, the patients we are serving, from a person-centered, patient-centered standpoint.”
Dr. Susan Andrews, a physician with Family Practice Partners that has been a “patient-centered medical home” since 2006, said direct focus on the patient is one approach to fixing “a broken health-care system.”
Without such an effort, Andrews said, “you lose sight of the whole person."
Dr. Pamela Singer, a family physician at the Murfreesboro Medical Clinic, said the key to effective health care for patients is “getting your patients to buy into their health care and realize that they are part of the team.”
Singer said she tells her patients: “I dispense information; it’s your job to decide what you are going to do with it. I will partner with you, but you have to decide that you are going to be part of this team.”
A coalition of major employers, consumer groups, patient quality organizations, health plans, labor unions, hospitals and clinicians have formed a coalition, the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative, to promote “a health care setting that facilitates partnerships between individual patients and their personal physicians, and when appropriate, the patient’s family.”
Among the organizations that established the founding principles of the organization were the American Academy of Family Physicians, American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Physicians and the American Osteopathic Association.
Dr. Nicolas Coté, also a family physician at Murfreesboro Medical Clinic, said, prevention is necessary for effective health care: “Preventative medicine has to be part of mainstream medicine.”
“We treat chronic disease because we have to, but the goal of a good family physician is to prevent the disease before it ever happens,” Coté said. “That is one of the reason our health care system is in such a nutty state -- because we don’t prevent disease, we treat it.”
Both Singer and Coté are osteopathic physicians, and they noted that patient-centered care is a basic tenet of osteopathic medicine.
Glover at MTMC said changes in health-care approaches, particularly with new health reform requirements, involve a team-approach to medical services: “Health is something I cultivate. I do that in a community of professional care providers that I can draw upon to navigate my health journey with me.”
“It’s about a care team that participates in your journey,” he said. “They are going to call you up, visit you.”
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