Prospects for person-centred diagnosis in general medicine

Fundamental changes in health care delivery are revealing the limitations of our collective focus on disease-specific and technology-driven health care. We increasingly treat diseases, not persons, and it moves individuals from active participants in the care process to passive recipients of interventions. This problem is especially important for general medicine, where we must maintain the balance between person and disease, caring and technology. In this chapter, we focus on prospects for person-centred diagnosis and treatment in general (primary care) medicine in this time of change. We describe one way to employ the biopsychosocial model to integrate person-centred diagnosis in routine clinical practice, and we propose a 'person-centred path' for primary care development with the health information technology tools we will need to develop to follow that path.