Patient-centered interviewing is to understand and respond to patient's needs and prefers at the level of patient. For practicing the patient-centered interview, the way of communication should be changed in history taking, explanation, and patient education. Story telling (illness narrative) which composes of 5 dimensions such as abstract, orientation, development (complication), evaluation, and coda is the unique and key way to approach the area of patient's illness experience, values, history of life, social environment (occupation, family relationship), and emotion. Narrative gives information about how a story teller views and expresses the event that he/she experienced before, and information about how a story teller positions the self, the subjects of story, and listener's identities. Narrative competence to listen to a patient's story requires several kind of interview skills at the moment of patient's expression of disease history, including skill for composing story, skill for listening, skill for empathizing, and skill for effective questioning. Collecting patient's illness story is not refi ned to the individual patient. If we listen to the various patients' illness stories, who have the similar disease, and arrange the stories systematically, the patients' illness database can help many patients by the facts in the database and the therapeutic power of the other patients' illness stories.
