What Matters to You, Matters to Us: A Case Study on Leveraging the Electronic Health Record for Patient-Centered Care

Patient-centered care is paramount for optimal outcomes. To address this, at Meritus Health, we asked a simple, yet profound question: "What matters most to you? (WMM)" This question, integrated into the patients' electronic health records (EHRs), facilitates meaningful conversations and helps tailor care to align with patient goals. This initiative, grounded in the principles of Age-Friendly Healthcare from the John A. Hartford Foundation, underscores the power of information by enabling clinicians to gain a comprehensive understanding of their patients. Our implementation required significant teamwork and provider engagement. Over 3 years, we have recorded more than 65,000 responses, creating a strategic priority for the health system to personalize care, guide clinical decision making, and drive continuous improvement. This strategic priority is health system wide. Patient-facing units and departments all across the health system track and report monthly metrics on the number of WMM responses captured. In addition, many departments across the system lead quality-improvement projects to improve and refine the process of asking this question.

We assessed the patient responses to the WMM question to identify the frequency of common answers and also sought to review the implementation of the question process for learning.

In our analysis of more than 65,000 patient responses, we categorized the answers into the top distinct groups with the top five categories identified being family and relationships (noted 38% of the time), well-being (22%), health concerns (15%), lifestyle (6%), and religion and faith (3%).

Asking and knowing WMM to patients offers more than just insight; it builds a meaningful conversation and relationship between the provider and patient in knowing the whole person. The top responses from patients are intuitively not surprising. The key to our questioning of the patients and the integration in the EHR are not the responses themselves, but the process of asking, knowing, and acting on WMM to patients. Ultimately, asking WMM can be a powerful tool in advancing patient-centric care and building population health.