In today’s increasingly complex healthcare environment, delivering high-quality outcomes requires more than clinical excellence alone—it demands a commitment to patient-centered care. Keeping patients at the center of every decision means aligning care teams, processes, and priorities around what matters most to those receiving care. As hospitals and health systems balance efficiency, quality, and experience, embracing a patient-centered approach is essential to building trust, improving outcomes, and delivering care that truly meets patients’ needs.
Health care has room for many opinions and perspectives, but there are a few fundamental truths that we, as physicians, must share.
- Delivering high-quality patient-centered care to our patients must remain at the center of strategies and decisions.
- The physician-patient relationship is sacrosanct and must be respected at all times, and physicians must govern clinical care at the bedside.
- We must strive to continuously improve – collaborating with our teams and colleagues, creating a positive work environment, and enacting meaningful change for the future of health care.
Guiding clinical principles
Our clinical strategy and approach are determined by our clinical leaders. We hold these beliefs and work to translate them into realities through our clinical and business practices based on three guiding principles:
Remain committed to our patients
Patients must always be at the center of our strategy and decisions because their care is our mission and responsibility. SCP’s infrastructure, processes, and resources are there to enable clinical care that is
- Consistent
- High-quality
- Data-driven
- Evidence-based
- Best-practice-informed
As patients are more than just individuals, we also believe we have a role in advancing the health of communities, and work to respect each community’s unique environment, needs, and culture.
Value and support clinicians
Physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants are highly-educated, -trained, and –qualified individuals, and we treat our colleagues as such. Sound clinical judgement is key to patient outcomes and we believe decisions that impact patient care should be made by our clinicians and our clinical leaders. Similarly, the clinician-patient relationship is one that must be respected at all times, and we structure our processes to support that.
Practicing medicine can certainly have its challenges, and there are more external factors than ever before impacting clinicians’ practice. SCP Health works hard to align clinical realities with operational objectives to ensure the sustainability of practice environments. This approach helps to minimize disruptions in care delivery and improves overall access to high-quality care.
Additionally, SCP supports clinicians by advocating with others across the industry at state and federal legislative levels to enact meaningful change for the future.
Collaborate and continuously improve
Delivering high-quality, patient-centered care is an ongoing process of continuous improvement. We believe in being transparent with feedback regarding clinician performance and encouraging clinicians to provide us with the same – by offering their input and solutions to improve care and workflow efficiency. A positive and collaborative work environment, one rooted in a values-based culture and respectful of clinician well-being, leads to high-performing teams and better experiences for both patients and clinicians.
Current landscape in hospital-based medicine
Hospital-based medicine has been hit with a perfect storm of staffing shortages, reimbursement decreases, and insurer consolidation. Many hospitals are experiencing financial difficulties, particularly those in rural and less economically advantaged areas. These factors combine to threaten access to care, patient safety, and clinicians’ well-being.
Actionable factors to consider for successful change:
Work to find sustainable funding mechanisms for accessible, 24/7 care
Emergency departments and inpatient hospital services are a necessity to ensure patients always have access to care, but the resources required to secure clinician availability for patients in need of medical care at any time of day or night are extensive. Recent reimbursement changes and rising operational costs have put this health care safety net at risk.
SCP, along with others in the industry, is speaking up about the issue and continuously adjusting to current operational realities in a way that minimizes the impacts for patients and clinicians alike.
Implement quality approaches that yield equitable care across locations
Different care delivery settings and locations have different needs, but the quality of care should remain the same for patients regardless of whether they are at a rural hospital or one in a metropolitan area. SCP strives to maintain high-quality care leveraging a highly structured quality approach, an emphasis on continuous improvement, and investment in innovation and research.
Another crucial principle of continued investment in innovation and research to improve care delivery is absolutely essential in health care today. New ideas and different modalities of care delivery will dictate what care looks like in the future. We must reimagine our methods, using the latest technologies available, and create new models that will ensure high-quality patient care is available in every environment and to every patient.
Together, we heal
Working together, the clinical and operational aspects of care delivery become stronger and more able to withstand market and industry volatility. SCP strongly believes in our obligation and responsibility to set high standards of clinical practice behavior and performance, and to continuously re-evaluate our motives, actions, and their impacts to make course corrections as needed.
We are committed to our mission of creating solutions to revitalize health care and welcome the opportunity to work with like-minded individuals and organizations in making that a reality.
Learn more about working with SCP Health as a health care organization or clinician.
By Ken Heinrich, MD and Rodolphe Taby, MD
