PCPCM Update: Your Measure, Your Patients’ Voices

A quality measure you may already use just got a vote of confidence — and a new home.

The Person-Centered Primary Care Measure (PCPCM) was built differently from most quality metrics. Rather than tracking what’s easy to count, it asks patients what actually matters to them about their care — things like feeling known by their doctor, getting help navigating the health system, and being cared for as a whole person. That’s exactly what family medicine does, and the PCPCM puts a number on it.

The measure was created by Drs. Rebecca Etz and Kurt Stange and their team at The Larry A. Green Center for the Advancement of Primary Health Care. It grew out of a 2017 national summit — STARFIELD III — that the Green Center convened to answer a deceptively simple question: what should we actually be measuring in primary care? Patients, clinicians, researchers, and policymakers worked together to answer it. The result was an 11-item survey, now validated, translated into more than 30 languages, and used across multiple countries and health systems.

ABFM’s Measures That Matter initiative has championed the PCPCM since 2019, helping move it from a validated research tool to a nationally endorsed measure now used in multiple CMS programs. That’s a significant lift — and it worked.

In 2026, stewardship of the measure passed back to the Green Center. Think of it as the measure reaching full maturity: it’s stable, endorsed, and sustainable enough to stand on its own, in the hands of the team that built it. ABFM continues to offer it through the Measures That Matter portfolio.

What this means for you: Nothing changes in how you use the PCPCM. It remains available through the PRIME registry and continues to be a meaningful, nationally recognized way to demonstrate the value of relationship-based care — in the language of your patients, not just your payers.