Our data analyst recently attended the Putting Care at the Center Conference in Los Angeles, CA. She presented a poster about PCIC’s interventions with High-Need, High-Cost patients, and discussed the importance of values-based care with fellow participants. Below are takeaways from our interview with her after she returned.
Q: What was a surprising takeaway from the conference?
Li Gai: At the conference, I started to view my software development work as part of a national social movement. Along with countless other organizations around the country, PCIC is trying to shift the current paradigm of care from putting disease at the center to putting the patient and his or her lifestyle goals at the center.
Q. How is PCIC contributing to this national movement of putting patients at the center of care?
Li Gai: PCIC is iteratively developing and improving an electronic health record software that prompts providers to see health from the patient’s perspective.
For example, say we have a patient who is not taking her psychiatric medications. The leading health record software would prompt her provider to label her as “non-compliant,” and move on.
Our software, on the other hand, prompts the provider to ask the patient, “Why not?” If the patient tells her provider that the pharmacy is not along her bus route, or that she’s concerned about adverse side effects, there’s a clear path to solve the root of the problem. Additionally, our software has a place for providers to document these answers so that future caregivers know which unique set of barriers are preventing each patient from obtaining quality care. These types of interactions, which can be facilitated through an intuitive electronic health record software such as ours, go a long way toward strengthening patient-provider relationships as well as achieving better health outcomes.
