Why Patient-centered Care Is No Longer Good Enough

ANTHONY TERSIGNI, president and CEO of Ascension in St. Louis, the nation’s largest nonprofit health system, recently discussed the system’s shift toward person-centered care and away from the old provider-centric model. | Interviewed by Marty Stempniak

What is this idea of person-centered care at Ascension?

TERSIGNI: We view person-centered care as our sacred promise to support individuals’ lifelong health and well-being through holistic care. It’s something that goes back to our roots. We have a 200-year legacy of caring for the whole person — body, mind and spirit. We recognize that each person represents a unique individual biologically, psychologically and sociologically. We believe, as care develops in the future, it’s going to become much more personalized than it has been in the past. Bottom line, the emphasis on person-centered care is our way of demonstrating the commitment that our founders have had for the last 200 years.

Why is this driving the conversation at your organization?

TERSIGNI: It is our strategic direction. I might say we’ve been on this path since 2002. At that time, we created our “call to action.” It is pretty basic and simple: We are going to promise the communities that we serve health care that works, health care that’s safe and health care that leaves no one behind. Then we figured that, in order for us to do it, we needed to have four different foundational blocks. One is hired people — the people who serve those we’re privileged to serve. The second is developing trusted partnerships along the continuum. Empower knowledge, which is much more relevant today than it was in 2002. And then having this vital presence everywhere around the community.

That’s basically been the foundation of what Ascension has been. As we look at other industries, individuals have choices and options in every aspect of their daily lives, and we know that access to more and timely information really increases their options. That’s really what we’re trying to bring to Ascension and health care, and that’s how we’ve refined that focus over time.

Is “patient” not encompassing enough?

TERSIGNI: Actually, you hit the nail right on the head. We chose person-centered care because, again, it’s really focused on the person and, in many cases, they’re not patients, especially if we speak about health education and wellness. We typically don’t think of them as patients, but really as consumers. While other systems are caring for patients, we make a conscious effort to talk about providing person-centered care that’s focused on persons not on patients.

Is that difficult in such a provider-centered industry?

TERSIGNI: We’re challenging ourselves to move into health care transformation, and we believe that the first phase is seeing person-centered care. What I mean by that is we’re seeing health services being redesigned around the person, helping individuals to become participants in managing their own lives. We’re seeing care teams becoming more multidisplinary and we envision they’ll ultimately include professionals like nutritionists, social workers, coaches and partners for health. We also see that the economic model will become population based and will reward value. We’re seeing that now. And so we see ourselves moving from physician-centered to person-centered, from transactional and episodic care to managed care by a team over time, from the idea of sick care to well-being. We’re moving from care that’s inaccessible and tied to bricks and mortar to care that’s going to be convenient and available 24/7/365. There’s a lot of transformation that we believe has come and is coming to our health care industry. We want to be on that bandwagon as we move forward, because we need to move toward evidence-based standards and away from what we’ve seen in our industry is a lot of unwarranted variation. It’s a monumental transformation.

How will being person-centered help in the shift to value?

TERSIGNI: We believe we need to bring health care and health services closer to the home. We need to bring information to the persons we serve on mobile devices they use in their daily lives. Last year, if you look at [Ascension’s] total $21 billion in revenue, 51 percent of that came from non-acute care services. While people see us as a large hospital system, which we are, we’re a lot more than that. We’ve recognized that the health care landscape is changing and there are opportunities for us. So what we’ve been doing along the way is really identifying the continuum of care, the partners that we need across the continuum, and looking at the longitudinal care that we’re going to provide under population health management.

Why is clinical integration key to person-centered care?

TERSIGNI: We believe that, through clinically integrated systems of care, we can enable quality improvements and increase cost-effectiveness. That’s basically what clinically integrated systems of care are. It says that we are going to use the resources within the community to raise the quality of care of the community, and, in many cases, it’s going to be partnering with others. That’s why, when I first stated our call to action, one of the foundational components is trusted partners. We know we can’t do it alone and so we’re going to need partners along that full continuum.

What do people want from person-centered care?

Tersigni: We’ve done a lot of focus groups over the last few years as we’ve refined our strategic direction, and they revealed four different areas. They want us to respect them, they want us to include them, they want us to connect them, and they want us to engage them. They say: Respect me. Those who care for me know me, understand what’s important to me and treat me with respect and communicate in a way that I can understand. They say: Include me. Those who care for me actually are listening to me, include my family and others I trust in my care, and work as a team in providing care that’s holistic — body, mind and spirit. I want to be connected to reliable health information that’s relevant to me and networks of people like me. People with chronic diseases want to be socially connected with other people who have those same chronic diseases so they can have a social dialogue in terms of what’s happening in their lives. The last piece is: Engage me. I engage in the decision-making with my trusted partners. Those are the four goals that we’ve been trying to achieve in the voice of the customer. It’s really all about creating a healthier community.

What is Ascension’s eventual destination point?

Tersigni: Our destination point is to develop the capabilities to take care of millions of lives from birth to death. That’s what person-centered care is all about; that’s what our call to action was when we created it; and that’s where our growth is focused. The bottom line for me is, while we’ve made great strides in accomplishing our call to action, our job is not done. We still have more to do in promising the communities we serve health care that works, health care that’s safe and health care that leaves no one behind. 

THE TERSIGNI FILE

Reading now:

A book called n=1, written by a good friend of mine, Dr. John Koster, a former CEO of Providence Health & Services. It talks about the uniqueness of each individual and how that is going to transform health care in this country.

Biggest influence:

Pope John Paul. When I read his autobiography, the thing that captured me most was he thought of the church and its future in increments of 100 years. I’m struggling to look beyond five years. It tells me I need to continue to reframe how I look at the future of health care.

Hobbies:

There isn’t anything I won’t read, and all types of subjects. I spend an awful lot of time on airplanes, and reading is a great way for me, not only to escape, but also to learn new things.