Patient-Centered Care: How Medical Centers Prioritize Your Well-Being

patient center care in a medical center

In an effort to provide the highest quality services to their patients, many medical centers have adopted what is referred to as “patient-centered care.” You may be wondering what this term actually means and how it relates to the care you normally expect from your primary care provider.

Simply put, patient-centered care is the practice of caring for both patients and their families in ways that are meaningful and valuable to the individual patient. Its core objective is a collaboration between healthcare providers and patients that aligns with patients’ values and preferences through shared decision-making. It involves listening to, informing, and involving patients in their own care.

However, there is more to patient-centered care than that. Here’s how prioritizes and can improve your overall well-being.

The Principles of Patient-Centered Care

At Palm Medical Centers, our physicians and entire staff follow the Eight Principles of Patient-Centered Care promoted by the National Institute of Health (NIH). These include:

  1. We respect our patient’s values, preferences, and expressed needs. We involve our patients in decision-making, acknowledging that they are individuals with their own values and preferences. In addition, we treat our patients with dignity, respect, and sensitivity to their cultural values and autonomy.
  2. We provide coordination and integration of care. Patients, particularly seniors, can feel vulnerable and powerless when confronted with illness. At Palm Medical Centers, we alleviate such feelings by providing coordination of clinical care, ancillary and support services, and front-line patient care.
  3. We provide information and patient education. This includes information on clinical status,
    progress, and prognosis; information on our processes of care; and information that facilitates
    patient autonomy, self-care, and health promotion.
  4. We strive to provide a high level of physical comfort for our patients. This has a significant
    impact on our patients’ experience. Particular areas of importance include medical center surroundings and environment, pain management, and available assistance with activities and daily living needs.
  5. We offer emotional support to alleviate the fear and anxiety associated with illness. These can
    be just as debilitating as the physical effects of illness, which is why our caregivers devote particular attention to anxiety over physical health status, treatment, and prognosis; the impact of an illness on the patient and their family; and the financial impact of an illness and treatment.
  6. We involve family and close friends in patient care. Recognizing the needs of a patient’s loved ones, we provide accommodations for them by involving them in decision-making and supporting them as caregivers.
  7. We provide continuity of service following treatment. Many patients, particularly seniors, are
    concerned about their ability to care for themselves after hospitalization. However, as primary care providers, the caregivers at Palm Medical Centers not only offer understandable and detailed information regarding medications, dietary needs, and physical limitations, but also coordinate and plan ongoing treatment, and provide information regarding access to clinical, social, and physical support on an ongoing basis.
  8. We provide access to further care when it is needed. At Palm Medical Centers, we focus on
    areas of follow-up care that are most important to our patients, such as available transportation, easy appointment scheduling, and access to in-house specialists or specialty services.

Medical Center in South and Central Florida

At Palm Medical Centers, we offer premier patient-centered primary care for seniors age 65+ with Medicare Advantage plans. We have 35 centers throughout Florida and Texas, and growing.

We provide our patient members with what we proudly call the Palm Medical Experience, which includes attentive doctors, knowledgeable and compassionate care coaches, and professional staff whose focus is on meeting the individual needs of patients in the diverse communities we serve. We have been bringing genuine kindness to senior primary care for more than 10 years.

To learn more about Palm Medical Centers and the many patient-centered services we offer, call us at (833)500-PALM (7256) or send us a message now. You can even request a tour of one of our multiple clinics located throughout South Florida and Central Florida. Contact us today!