Patient- and Family-Centered Care Coordination: A Framework for Integrating Care for Children and Youth Across Multiple Systems

Understanding a care coordination framework, its functions, and its effects on children and families is critical for patients and families themselves, as well as for pediatricians, pediatric medical subspecialists/surgical specialists, and anyone providing services to children and families. Care coordination is an essential element of a transformed American health care delivery system that emphasizes optimal quality and cost outcomes, addresses family-centered care, and calls for partnership across various settings and communities. High-quality, cost-effective health care requires that the delivery system include elements for the provision of services supporting the coordination of care across settings and professionals

Integrated care for healthcare sustainability for patients living with rare diseases

The increasingly complex and multidimensional care request, combined with the presence of increasingly aware and demanding patients, accentuates the need for new strategies to preserve health systems economic sustainability. Therefore, integration mechanisms reveal an essential condition for ensuring continuity of care. The paper reviews the main literature available on the integration of heal services and relates it to rare diseases.

The literature identifies several system levers for the effective design and implementation of integrated care frameworks, namely: political support and commitment, governance, stakeholder engagement, organisational change, leadership, collaboration and trust, workforce education and training, patient empowerment, financing and incentives, ICT ...

Integrated care for older people (ICOPE) implementation framework: guidance for systems and services

Alongside supporting community-level services, the Integrated Care for Older People (ICOPE) approach helps broader health and social care systems effectively respond to the diverse and complex needs of older people. The ICOPE Implementation Framework provides guidance for policy makers and programme managers to concretely assess and measure the capacity of services and systems to deliver integrated care at the community level.

The ICOPE Implementation Framework provides a score card to help assess the overall capacity of health and social care services and systems to deliver integrated care in community settings and support the development of ICOPE implementation action plans. There ...

Globalization and health equity: The impact of structural adjustment programs on developing countries

Among the many drivers of health inequities, this article focuses on important, yet insufficiently understood, international-level determinants: economic globalization and the organizations that spread market-oriented policies to the developing world. One such organization is the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which provides financial assistance to countries in economic trouble in exchange for policy reforms. Through its ‘structural adjustment programs,’ countries around the world have liberalized and deregulated their economies. We examine how policy reforms prescribed in structural adjustment programs explain variation in health equity between nations—approximated by health system access and neonatal mortality. Our empirical analysis uses an original dataset ...

Health in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: from framework to action, transforming challenges into opportunities

The clock is ticking and just a little more than 10 years remain to meet the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Enhanced political and public awareness, inter- and transdisciplinary engagement, new partnerships, and multisectoral collaborations are required to foster knowledge-and-action societies in order to tackle the complex issues that are inherent to sustainable development. A one-day symposium held in Basel, Switzerland, in November 2018 offered a venue for open exchange on how to stimulate dialogue for co-creating innovative ideas and scalable action to address some of the most pressing challenges of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Clinical leadership and integrated primary care: A systematic literature review

As numbers of chronically ill patients with complex healthcare needs are increasing, primary care professionals will be challenged to deliver integrated care. Integrated care is about ‘delivering seamless care for patients with complex long-term problems cutting across multiple services, providers and settings.
Leaders are needed to address healthcare changes essential for implementation of integrated primary care. What kind of leadership this needs, which professionals should fulfil this role and how these leaders can be supported remains unclear.

Reconceptualising Person-Centered Service Models as Social Ecology Networks in Supporting Integrated Care

Efforts to address problems such as mental health, poverty, social exclusion, and chronic disease have often proven resistant to traditional policies or interventions. This paper takes up the challenge and present a pioneering new method of analysis in drawing on theoretical and methodological extensions of two prominent approaches, namely, social network analysis and developmental social ecology. Considered in combination, these two seemingly disparate approaches frame a powerful new way of thinking about person-centred care, as well as offer a methodologically more rigorous set of analytical tools. The conceptual model developed from this combination offers to bridge the apparent disconnect between ...

Challenges to patient centredness – a comparison of patient and doctor experiences from primary care

Many countries and international organisations, such as OECD and WHO, have chosen patient centredness as the approach to ensure that the patients’ needs, values, and preferences are appropriately considered in the health care meetings. Whereas most OECD countries show progress in implementing patient-centred care, no country performs in the top group on all indicators in cross-country comparison. Patient-centred consultation methodologies vary, but reoccurring components can be identified in the literature, such as the patient’s narrative and collaboration.
This article designed an observational study to investigate the level of patients’ and doctors’ ratings of patient-centred aspects of the primary care ...

The impact of a comprehensive electronic patient portal on the health service use: an interrupted time-series analysis

EPPs hold promise for reducing hospital readmissions. Certain patient populations with chronic conditions may differentially benefit from portal use depending on their needs for communication with their providers.
However, there is little empirical research on the potential benefit that electronic patient portals (EPP) can have on the care quality and health outcomes of diverse multi-ethnic international populations. The purpose of this study is to determine the extent to which an EPP was associated with improvements in health service use.

Service Delivery Models to Maximize Quality of Life for Older People at the End of Life: A Rapid Review

In an era of unprecedented global aging, a key priority is to align health and social services for older populations in order to support the dual priorities of living well while adapting to a gradual decline in function. The aimed of this review was to provide a comprehensive synthesis of evidence regarding service delivery models that optimize the quality of life (QoL) for older people at the end of life across health, social, and welfare services worldwide.