December 10, 2007

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Patients suffering from several medical conditions at once often are complex to treat. Patients’ socioeconomic, cultural, behavioral and environmental circumstances add to this complexity, and significantly impact their treatment and outcomes.

To recognize these complexities and improve physician-patient relationships, as well as overall patient outcomes, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) have created a conceptual model that incorporates patient complexity into health care strategies and measurements of health care quality. The research is published in the December edition of the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

“If the multiple forces of complexity are not recognized and addressed they become barriers to communication between patient and physician, leading to non-adherence and diminishing the physician’s effectiveness on optimizing health,” said Monika M. Safford, M.D., associate professor of preventive medicine at UAB. “Our model provides an approach to patient complexity, ways to maximize the impact of medical recommendations and evaluate the quality of care a patient receives.”

Safford and her team of researchers say further research is needed in this area because current clinical guidelines rarely prioritize between multiple conditions and current quality measures do not take patient complexity into consideration. She said they hope this model is the first step in providing the framework for future efforts to improve and measure quality of care.