Putting Patients First and Engaging the Entire Care Team: Beau Raymond, MD

Patient-centered care revolves around more than just the patient, explained Beau Raymond, MD, MMM, FACP, chief medical officer, Ochsner Health Network. While the patient lies at the center, Raymond argued the importance of staying engaged with the surrounding caregivers, family members, and others, who make up the patient’s “team.”

In this interview with The American Journal of Managed Care^®, Raymond explored the true meaning behind “patient-centered care,” how the goals of these models are inherently intertwined with those of value-based care, and the impediments of fee-for-service models.

These topics and more were discussed at a recent Institute for Value-Based Medicine event held in New Orleans, Louisiana, on April 10, 2025.

This transcript has been lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

What does patient-centered care entail, and what metrics can help measure the success of patient-centered care approaches?

Whenever you're doing patient-centered care, you're really focused on the patient clearly at the center, I mean the definition’s there. It's about looking at what that individual wants and needs, and what their goals of care are, and how you surround that patient with that. You have to communicate well, you have to have empathy for that patient and what's going on. You have to be educating that patient as to what's happening with them, because if they don't understand what's happening, they can't come to the right conclusions to what they think is best for them. All those things are part of it, and so you have to be engaged with a patient constantly about what their wishes are. You have to also engage with the family members and their caregivers, because they're part of the team as well. A lot of it has to do with communication, transparency, and the like, to understand what the patient's really wanting.

From an understanding [of] the measures of that, the measure of success is really going to be the outcomes for the patient. How did they actually do with whatever is going on with them, their experience, how they rate their own experience? Those are the things that you're really looking for. In a patient-centered model, the patient is the one who's determining whether you're doing a good job or not, based on purely that—how they feel like they're being treated—as well as the actual health outcomes.

How would you describe the relationship between patient-centered and value-based care?

There's a huge overlap between those two. You can have a patient-centered model where, in that, you try to surround the patient with other things to assist them in how they they manage their care. The problem is, in a regular fee-for-service model that exists, there's not a lot of revenue for that, so you can't provide those services without there being something to allow you to do that. When you're in a value-based care model, you're getting population-based payments, whether it's a care management fee or whether it's shared savings, shared risk, whatever the case may be, there are dollars that you're then able to dedicate to surround that patient with extra resources.

When we talk about that, it's, for example, just simply straightforward within Ochsner, “patients first” is 1 of our core values—the first one, because it should be. With that, we have value-based care agreements that are in place. And because of that, we're able to have community health workers, social workers, case managers, dietary resources, health coaches, all these other different people are able to be there to help support the patient and their journey [with] however they help determine what they want to be their health outcomes.