The Center for Patient Partnerships
Our Services:
Advocate
The Center for Patient Partnerships helps individuals and families facing life-threatening and serious chronic illnesses get the care they need, make informed decisions and address issues related to serious health conditions.
Through its advocacy program, patients become more effective self-advocates. The Center helps them:
- Learn about their illnesses and explore treatment options
- Access quality medical care
- Appeal insurance denials
- Determine eligibility for public and private benefits
- Sort out financial and employment related problems
- Talk with family members and coworkers about their illnesses
The Center's comprehensive advocacy services are provided by graduate and professional students enrolled in its interdisciplinary program. These services are supervised by experience patient advocates and are provided free of charge. Read More.
Educate
At the Center, future doctors, lawyers, nurses, pharmacists, health policy experts, social workers and health systems engineers work with patients to become effective advocates. Through course work, practical advocacy experience and independent study, students collaborate to understand and address problems within the health care system.
In graduate-level courses, students:
- Meet regularly with staff and guest experts from a range of disciplines to explore patient-centered care
- Examine health system financing and delivery
- Explore barriers to health care access
- Learn the legal and ethical rights of patients
- Consider alternatives for health care reform
In the Center's interdisciplinary clinical program, students learn the skills they need to advocate for individual patients and for health system transformation. Read more.
Collaborate
The Center for Patient Partnerships collaborates with health care researchers to promote consumer-centered research and practice. The Center also fosters and disseminates knowledge about consumer-centered care models and practices nationally.
Current projects include:
- Identifying barriers to health care access for local Hmong and Latino communities sponsored by the American Cancer Society
- Training breast cancer survivors as advocates, culminating in a national curriculum sponsored by the Madison Affiliate of the Susan G. Komen Foundation
- Survivorship care planning with the IOM/NCCS national work group
- Co-creating national Health Advocates Association
- Co-authoring first patient advocacy textbook and first compendium of readings about health advocacy
Innovate
Consumer voices remain largely absent from health care industry board rooms, policy discussions, and legislative initiatives. Using patient experiences to shape messages, the Center promotes research, education and policy initiatives that put patients first.
The Center tells its clients' stories to shape health care reform:
- Advocating successfully for legislation mandating coverage of clinical trials
- Co-sponsoring community discussions of proposals for affordable health care
- Joining national advocacy efforts to improve cancer survivorship care planning
- Identifying ways health systems can remove barriers to care
Applying innovation to its own work, the Center is a leader in the national discussion to create standards for patient advocacy. Read more.
Want to Help?
As the Center for Patient Partnerships grows, you can help educate, advocate and innovate to make health systems more consumer-centered. Though we do not charge for our advocacy services, we welcome contributions to the Center. Please join the mission by contributing!
