BLOGSCAN - Does Doing Surveys and Having Patient Registries Make a Doctor More "Patient-Centered?"

On the Retired Doc's Thoughts blog is a post criticizing bureaucratically derived measures of quality of care. It seems that to some, for doctors to provide "patient-centered care" requires them to use electronic medical records (EMRs), set up patient registries, and survey their own patients about quality of care. Although EMR advocates hype them as a panacea, readers of MedInformaticsMD's comments on Health Care Renewal will realize they have not yet lived up to that promise. As a (reformed?) health services researcher, I certainly value patient registries and survey instruments. But given how hard it is to design, execute, and interpret results from these tools, I wonder how merely having them available makes a doctor's care more "patient-centered?" Read Retired Doc's even crustier comments.