Evaluation of Person-Centered Health Services

Abstract

Person-centered care is increasingly regarded as the gold standard. Although traditionally health care settings have relied solely on the concept of patient satisfaction to evaluate the care of a person’s experience in health care settings, serious doubts have been expressed about the validity or adequacy of this criterion. Satisfaction is unable to encompass the range of feelings, values, and experiences of a person while traversing a health care system. Additionally, many health care professionals believe that they already provide person-centered care, while there is little evidence that this is the case, as it is difficult to monitor or measure such care in a way that reflects the key elements of person-centeredness. In response to this situation, a review of the literature has been conducted specifically on person-centered evaluation of health services. The results suggested that while some efforts have been reported, there is a dearth of developments that have been systematic, reliable, and valid, or of purported general use. Work of the International College of Person-Centered Medicine, with support from the World Health Organization, is then summarized toward the systematic conceptualization of person-centered medicine and health care, the development of a prototype person-centered care index, the analysis of its metric features, and its initial validation. On the basis of these considerations and results, it can be concluded that a valuable profile of key concepts of person-centered health care has been elucidated and that the person-centered care index seems to represent a promising instrument for generic assessment of person-centered health care across settings and populations.