Enhancing Your Healthcare

As individuals grow older they may face multiple chronic conditions, cognitive challenges and mobility issues, all of which can affect overall quality of life. By focusing on a person’s own priorities, healthcare providers can tailor interventions that not only manage specific conditions but also enhance well-being. Enhanced healthcare recognizes that medical treatments should not be pursued for their own sake but for how they improve the patient’s life in meaningful ways.

Patient priorities care (PPC) is a personalized, holistic approach to healthcare that focuses on what matters most to patients rather than just their medical conditions. It involves understanding the patients’ values, preferences and goals in the context of their overall life. This care model emphasizes active collaboration between patients, their families and healthcare providers to ensure that treatment plans align with the individual’s unique priorities. A very helpful online tool to help determine what are healthcare priorities is https://myhealthpriorities.org/. This website has a series of questions that require people to contemplate the priorities in their life and will result in a document that can be shared with their healthcare providers. 

PPC is especially important in age-friendly healthcare, which prioritizes dignity and autonomy and empowering older adults to make decisions about their own care. It shifts away from a model of one-size-fits-all, offering a more compassionate, person-centered approach that is essential for older populations. By aligning care with patients’ priorities an approach is achieved that fosters better health outcomes and improves the quality of life for aging individuals.

At USC VHH’s Community Resource Center for Aging, the graduate-level resource specialists work with clients to help them with what is known in age-friendly healthcare as the four M’s: What Matters to You, Mentation, Mobility and Medications. PPC is rooted in knowing what matters to you as a person and is the cornerstone of all the service provided to anyone seeking assistance from the Resource Center; having a thoughtful conversation about what is going on in their life, what is needed and what is wanted – from both a healthcare and social care perspective.  

For more information about how USC Verdugo Hills Hospital can help address whatever aging-related issues/challenges people are facing and help in developing a care plan through a lens that includes each person’s priorities, contact the USC-VHH resource specialists Monday through Friday for a complimentary phone consultation or to arrange an in-office appointment. Email Aging-Resources@med.usc.edu or call (818) 949-4033.  

For more information about Patient Priorities Care visit https://patientprioritiescare.org/.