CMS' PFE Affinity Group was born out of CMS' Quality Strategy and aims to bring together all of CMS' engagement efforts to better coordinate and collaborate on engagement efforts, but the affinity group recently underwent a name change.
Previously the Patient and Family Engagement Affinity Group, the group is now known as the Person and Family Engagement Affinity Group.
Maaden Eshete Jones, technical advisor for communications and outreach at CMS, recently told QIO News why CMS made the small but significant name change.
"Toward the end of 2015, we began making calls to stakeholders and inquiring about language being used in the field," she said. "We heard from most stakeholders that the preferred concept was 'person' to reflect the fact that people — including Medicare beneficiaries — are not always in the position of being patients. We decided to adopt this terminology based on this feedback, and to keep in line with the call at CMS and across the broader HHS community to keep the person at the center of our work."
Before the year ends, the PFE Affinity Group aims to finalize HHS' PFE Strategy, which will "serve as a guidebook and be a living document that evolves over time," Ms. Jones said. "We have been engaging with associations, patients, caregivers and other stakeholders to get their input on it. We also want to engage with these audiences when rolling out the strategy."