CAN HEALTH LAW TRULY BECOME PATIENT CENTERED?

Close to a decade ago, the Institute of Medicine report, Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century, identified patient-centeredness as a core health care aim for the new century, focusing on the patient's experience of illness and health care and on the systems that work or fail to work to meet individual patients' needs. The legal system is richly intertwined with the medical system in so many ways beyond litigation, from hospital and medical licensure to the regulation of private and public health insurance to the policy analysis and legislative negotiations that resulted in the recently enacted Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, just to name a few. While patient-centered care promises both a theoretically and practically appealing antidote to many of the shortcomings of the US health care system, it remains unclear how well the legal system can advance that agenda.