When Patient-Centered Care Initiatives Align: Integrating VA Whole Health and Shared Decision-Making for Lung Cancer...

System-wide, patient-centered health care transformations and efforts to enhance shared decision-making (SDM) are often separate initiatives. Multiple initiatives can create competing or inefficient demands on clinicians. This is evident within the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Whole Health System of Care and the aligned but distinct effort to implement SDM for lung cancer screening (LCS).

This article describes a VA-based research team's efforts to identify alignment between whole health and SDM for LCS and to integrate these initiatives into a single model to inform future health care practitioner training. The study identified areas of overlap between the 2 initiatives and created a 3-step model for integrating SDM and whole health for LCS.

Integrating 2 programs previously treated as separate initiatives ensured uptake for both SDM for LCS and whole health. This approach of integrating separate initiatives can be applied more broadly to other VA programs or in any health care system seeking to advance SDM within broader patient-centered care initiatives.