Human-Centered Quality: Reframing Quality Around What Matters to People

Each encounter one has in healthcare is an experience. It is everything someone lives through. It is what they remember and all they perceive. It is their lasting story. When we see the experience one has in healthcare from that lens, then all the components that shape that story are parts of their experience. From this perspective, for as much as the clinical framing of experience as metrics on a survey has seen experience identified as a dimension of quality, we would suggest the opposite. Quality is but one part of the experience someone has in healthcare today. It is a component of one's overall experience. In this paper we offer the perspective that, quality is not simply a culmination of measures, but rather a commitment to an experience that ensures high quality, safe care. Care encounters where both the physical and socio-emotional impacts we have on those we care for matter. We suggest we must reframe quality beyond just the traditional metrics (which we are not suggesting change), to be inclusive of what matters to those we care for and serve. We offer a model for Human Centered Quality: the collective capacity of healthcare systems to enable patients, families, care partners and the healthcare professionals caring for them, to actively work together towards co-defined goals that matter, by bridging professional expertise and lived experience, and ensuring the conditions necessary for both perspectives to be engaged in achieving meaningful outcomes are established and sustained.