Patient-Centered Care

This emphasis on patient-centered care is widely applicable to the entire spectrum of VA care, as it underlies all efforts to provide better care for veterans by seeking to understand the veteran’s perspective on the process and outcomes of care. It will be particularly important in understanding the unique health concerns of recently deployed veterans. CHQOER has already made significant contributions in this area, starting with the efforts of Lewis Kazis, ScD, to develop and refine methodologies to capture health-related quality of life; and more recently through the work of other investigators including Nancy Kressin, PhD, (interventions to enhance patient-provider communication), Susan Eisen, PhD, (patient-reported mental health outcomes), and Barbara Bokhour, PhD, (qualitative assessments of patients’ healthcare experience). Important impacts on VA care from this work have included the recent adoption of the Veterans Rand 12-item Health Survey (VR-12) for ongoing use by the VA Office of Quality and Performance (OQP) and by CMS (Lewis Kazis, ScD). This emphasis on patient-centered care also builds on strengths within Department of Health Policy and Management at BU SPH which has recently added to its faculty Alan Jette, PhD, a national expert in using computer adaptive testing and item response theory to capture patient-reported outcomes. In our choice of research on patient-centered care, we express our commitment to the VA strategic mission and our intention to further enhance our understanding of patients’ experience with care.