A front-page article in the Wall Street Journal in June 2006 documented the project's successes. The patient-centered care approach and payment model, the article's author suggested, "could offer a way to help ease the U.S.'s seemingly intractable health-care crisis."

As a result of work supported by the Fund and others, more health care organizations are monitoring the quality of care they provide to racial and ethnic minority patients. In the next year, the Fund's Program on Quality of Care for Underserved Populations will identify organizations that have demonstrated high performance in delivering care to low-income and minority patient populations. These organizations are likely to have transferable "best practices" and could serve as models for others.

In recent years, "cultural competency" has been recognized as a key component of patient-centered care. Physicians and other health care professionals who are culturally competent show respect for and demonstrate understanding of patients' preferences and their cultural, social, and economic backgrounds, and engage patients in decision-making with regard to treatment plans. Data from the Commonwealth Fund 2004 International Health Policy Survey of Adults' Experiences with Primary Care show that minority patients often experience difficulties communicating with their providers. For example, black and Latino patients in the survey were less likely than white patients to report that their doctors listen carefully to them (69% and 76% vs. 87%). To improve patient–provider relationships, projects supported by the Fund focus on developing standards for cultural competency training and evaluating the effectiveness of culturally competent health care practices.

Through a Fund grant, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) created TACCT—the Tool for Assessing Cultural Competence Training—which enables medical educators to determine whether their curricula include key components of cultural competency education.⁽⁶⁾ Fund support also allowed researchers to examine the degree to which cultural competency training has been incorporated into graduate medical education. As detailed in a September 2005 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Joel Weissman, Ph.D., Joseph Betancourt, M.D., and Eric Campbell, Ph.D., at Harvard Medical School found that there is substantial room for improvement in preparing physicians to care for diverse patient populations.⁽⁷⁾ Overall, the three researchers found that medical residents think cross-cultural training is important to the delivery of high-quality care. Yet, residents lack the time and mentoring they would need to learn how to provide cross-cultural care, and hospitals do not evaluate residents on this aspect of performance.