Monday, November 7, 2011

Family Medicine and the Human Centered Health Home

What's going to happen in health care as we try to find ways not to bankrupt America with the wrong model of care?  As a Family Physician, I know we need to continue our relationship-based connection with patients, their health and their diseases.  The Medical Industrial Complex seeks to further "widgetize" healthcare into numbers, computers and financially "suckable" elements, ignoring important human elements of patient care.  


The Human Centered Health Home (HCHH) is the broad model I’ve been developing with colleagues in our Center for Innovation in Family and Community Health (CIFCH).   Many holistic skills and the relationship driven aspects of Family Medicine fit nicely into the HCHH.  


The five senses connect the human dyad that assumes the patient-physician roles.  The overlapping energy fields of the dyad allow further connection. 


How do they develop and enhance the healing potential?  What type of partnership evolves for the dyad that grows to neighborly proportions, powerful enough to protect the pair from the unsafe aspects of the Medical world?  How does the pair allow exploration of new and unusual strategies for health maintenance and responses to chronic and sometimes fatal conditions?  How do they learn to respect and honor each other in the context of their shared and respective life quests?

How can a human in the patient role quickly realign a physician into a mutually beneficial relationship?  How will a person in the patient role know when they should sever a potentially harmful relationship with a physician?

I’ll blog about this the next couple days to circle the potential in the HCHH model for use by activists .  I’ve written and spoken about holistic strategies for clinical survival for medical learners and holistic strategies for dealing with chronic pain for patients and practitioners.

Together, as humans, we can connect in a healing dyad of patient and physician, protected from the unsafe, financially destructive aspects of the Medical Industrial Complex.

Can this happen to help those with chronic diseases?

What do you think?

Submitted for day 7 post in #NHBPM  on Twitter and Wegohealth.com.


1 comment:

  1. Calling it the Human Centered Health Home seems off target somehow, perhaps implying there is a Pet Centered Health Home or a Wild Animal Health Home or a Domesticated Animal Health Home, further distancing us from our important and core relationship: doctor and patient. The patient centered medical home title is accurate and generally understood by all. Has the word "patient" become unacceptable or tainted in someway so its use must be avoided?

    I suspect I dislike the "medical industrial complex" as much as you do, especially the presumption of improved quality, efficiency and cost if the provision of "health care services" models the "widget on an assembly line" approach, shown to be successful in other industries. Medical care and the multifaceted components of the doctor-patient relationship are simply not "widgetizable" despite the findings of the 2005 Rand analysis.

    So leave the name as the Patient Centered Medical Home. Or modify it to the Patient-Physician Centered Medical Home, assuming it is that relationship we hope to protect and strengthen. JMHO

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