What is Integrated Care?
Integrated care aims to streamline and enhance the patient experience so that care is coordinated, continuous, and truly patient-centered. The concept revolves around creating a seamless healthcare journey for patients, supported by evolving technologies and aligned with societal shifts in care delivery.
Elements of Integrated Care
1. Seamless Shared Records: Patients do not need to repeat their health history every time they see a care provider. Shared records provide a comprehensive view of patient health.
2. Seamless Handoff Between Care Interfaces: Ensures smooth transitions between general practitioners, specialists, and allied health professionals.
3. Seamless Coordination to Interact with the Same Provider: Patients consistently interact with the same care provider they trust.
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The goal is for everyone to experience this level of coordinated care.
Approaches to Building Integrated Care Systems
Top-Down Approach: This method involves taking existing large-scale, multi-specialty care assets, consolidating them, hiring technologists and data scientists, and trying to integrate the system from the top down. While this approach can look promising, it faces challenges. It is difficult to create an integrated care delivery system when incentives lean towards keeping people sicker and repeatedly walking through the doors.
Bottom-Up Approach: This alternative method involves building a bottom-up integrated care system. It starts with keeping the global population as potential beneficiaries, making the system universal, and building it block by block. This approach rethinks the essential components needed for an integrated care system, leverages new technologies, and focuses on a singular incentive of keeping people healthy and happy.
Creating an integrated care system requires rethinking traditional models, leveraging cutting-edge technology, and prioritizing patient happiness. Patients of tomorrow seek to be happy, healthy individuals going about their lives, and care providers are equally striving to do their best and wish to live their lives happily.