Patient-centered care

Health Management Glossary

Health Sociology

Definition. Patient-centered care is care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs and values, and ensures that patient values guide clinical decisions.

Explanation

The Institute of Medicine named patient-centeredness as one of six aims for health system improvement (Institute of Medicine, 2001). Digital inclusion is now part of readiness for patient-centered care (Sun et al., 2013), and matching treatment to patients’ preferences can be studied as an outcome in its own right (Umar et al., 2012).

Related concepts

Shared decision-making Patient participation Patient empowerment Patient experience

Read on The Health Topics

• The Concept of Digital Inclusion: A Conceptual and Integrative Introduction from the Perspective of Health Sciences and Health Management
• Matching Patient Preferences to Physician Recommendations in Psoriasis Treatment

References

Institute of Medicine. (2001). Crossing the quality chasm: A new health system for the 21st century. National Academy Press.

Sun, J., Wang, Y., & Rodriguez, N. (2013). Health digital inclusion and patient-centered care readiness in the USA. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 32, 201–216.

Umar, N., Litaker, D., Schaarschmidt, M. L., Peitsch, W. K., Schmieder, A., & Terris, D. D. (2012). Outcomes associated with matching patients’ treatment preferences to physicians’ recommendations: study methodology. BMC Health Services Research, 12 (1), 1. https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-12-1

Cite this entry: Kurutkan, M. N. (2026). Patient-centered care. In The Health Topics glossary. https://healthtopic.org/glossary/patient-centered-care/

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