Patient Centric Healthcare and Infection Prevention

What kind of leader will Dr. Donald Berwick be, if he becomes the new administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)? If confirmed, the co-founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) would be at the helm of the agency responsible for crafting and enforcing regulations relating to two extremely important government programs. Politics aside, would Berwick be a friend to the infection prevention and healthcare epidemiology community?

Healthcare policy expert Berwick, by his own confession, is unabashedly supportive of the "patient-centered healthcare" movement. As he notes in an article for Health Affairs, "Its proper incorporation into new healthcare designs will involve some radical, unfamiliar, and disruptive shifts in control and power, out of the hands of those who give care and into the hands of those who receive it. Such a consumerist view of the quality of care, itself, has important differences from the more classical, professionally dominated definitions of "quality."

Berwick says that patient-centered care often has "a positive relationship to classical health status outcomes. This is in part because patients and families can bring useful knowledge to care if they are invited to do so." Berwick acknowledges that healthcare professionals have forever had a stranglehold on the delivery of care, insomuch that the relationship between physician/caregiver and the patient is more of a dictatorship than a democracy. Berwick urges us to rethink these processes as a part of the ongoing quality improvement efforts that are currently a part of U.S. healthcare reform. He notes that three maxims should govern healthcare: "The needs of the patient come first." "Nothing about me without me." "Every patient is the only patient."

Do you think these maxims mesh well with the infection prevention agenda? Does the patient's needs for freedom from potential social stigma trump aggressive contact precautions, for example? Share your thoughts in our online comments section.

To read more from Health Affairs, CLICK HERE.