A Patient-Centered Approach to Health Equity: Eboni Price-Haywood, MD, and Toni Flowers, PhD

Eboni Price-Haywood, MD, MPH, MMM, associate dean at Xavier Ochsner College of Medicine, and Toni Flowers, PhD, DHL, MBA, chief diversity and social responsibility officer at LCMC Health, argue that a patient-centered approach is necessary to address the emotional, psychological, and environmental aspects of a patient's life, ensuring comprehensive care.

Price-Haywood highlights the importance of patient-centered care, which involves understanding a patient's personal and living circumstances to provide tailored medical care, while Flowers highlights the distinction between health disparities and health care disparities, noting that both must be addressed to improve patient outcomes.

This transcript was lightly edited for clarity; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

How can patient-centered strategies adapt to meet the unique needs of different communities and address social determinants of health/disparities?

Price-Haywood: I think by definition, when we say patient-centered, it’s about basing everything you do through understanding the person that's in front of you. That means that I have to understand your personal circumstances, your living circumstances, financial circumstances, any issues that might impact your ability to take care of yourself and to be well. Patient-centered strategies have to be grounded in understanding the needs of the patient, and so that's where social determinants of health come into play.

Those of us who practice patient-centered care, routinely will ask questions about those circumstances so that we can ground our decisions in how we're going to take care of the patient, how we're going to approach their therapeutics, or whatever the case may be, based on what we've identified as a need. Bottom line is, if a person's needs, or social needs in particular, are not taken care of, your medical issues are not a priority, and that's just a practical thing.

To enable and empower people to take care of themselves, we've got to understand their circumstances. We've got to ask the right questions, and we also have to work towards helping them gain the solutions that are necessary to take care of themselves.

Flowers: The patient-centered care model is, I think, so ideal for where we are today in health care. Recognizing how important it is to understand our patients and their needs and even understand why they chose us to care for them. I would say that one of the biggest issues is to understand how a patient identifies what their health issue is and the sense of priorities.

We recognize certainly that we have the data that tells us about the difference between health disparities and health care disparities, but to be able to decrease health disparities, which is incidence of disease within populations, is about behavior change, but addressing health care disparities, which is the difference in the quality of care that's provided to patients by health care providers, 2 different things, and we want to address both.

I think it's important to recognize, if the patient is at the center of the work that we do, then we are taking into effect the emotional, the psychological, the physical, the environmental, all those aspects of who that patient is in the care that we provide to them. If we leave any of those aspects out, we're not taking care of the whole patient.