The Personal Doctoring Manifesto: A Perspective from the Keystone IV Conference

Abstract

The Keystone IV Conference was a touchstone moment for multigenerational conversations regarding our health care system and an opportunity to reconnect with the values of personal doctoring as a vocation. It inspired participants to renew commitments to relationships, healthy communities, and social change. Keystone IV was also a stark reminder of the need to rekindle family medicine’s counterculture flame in today’s tumultuous health care environment and reclaim the role of personal doctors in American society. Reimagining and reigniting the fire of personal relationship is today’s counterculture movement for primary care. Personal doctors must heed the call for immediate action, which requires defining when relationships matter most in health care and understanding how to harness paradigm shifts in information technology, team-based care, and population health to strengthen, rather than undermine, personal doctoring. Simultaneously, we must also invent a new notion of personal doctoring that creates partnerships with patients and families to drive forward a social movement demanding health care focused on the whole person in the context of his or her community. Change will occur when patients insist on a personal doctoring approach as an essential priority for what they expect from the health care system—that anything less is unacceptable.