Investigating patient-centered care.

Abstract

This issue provides many articles reporting on research pertinent to patient-centered care, with great richness in the variety of methods and settings. Topics include disparities in the availability of care and the type of care provided (including a randomized trial), effecting elective hospitalizations on future patient satisfaction, the effect of the specific content of the after visit summary, 2 articles related to aspects of shared decision making, 2 articles considering the effects of practice culture, plus a report on divergent views on how to integrate behavioral and primary health care. Differences between academic and nonacademic family medicine practice are finally documented, with important dissimilarities in patient-centered care. Family physicians are highly involved with dementia care. An exciting report documents a high negative predictive value for a new genomic expression test for coronary artery disease in family medicine that uses combinations of gene expression instead of individual gene testing.