Cleveland Clinic

Henry Ng, MD, MPH: Clinician at Lakewood Family Health Center

Although there were practical challenges due to COVID and other internal issues inherent in a busy clinical practice, we found success with implementing Patient Priorities Care and learned much from the first years. PPC gave us as clinicians a shared common language when talking about What Matters Most to patients, and it was extremely useful and a helpful aid in getting to know our patients better and recognizing their values and priorities. This approach allowed us to have a unified way to have these types of important conversations with our patients, as well as a solution to enhance documentation efficiency.

One example of some of the challenges faced was that some patient visits were longer due to convincing the patient of the value of PPC, made more complicated by deferred care due to pandemic creating competing priorities. This approach is a paradigm shift for both patients and clinicians. We learned that it was important not to put a PPC encounter into a silo or “bucket” as a certain type of visit and that this is not a “one size fits all” approach. We are excited for what PPC brings to our encounters and see it as the “why” for patient engagement.