Care Coordination: Integrated, Patient-Centric Approach to Improve Health Outcomes - Essay Sample

Introduction

Care coordination is practical approaches aimed at bringing together healthcare professionals to enable them to address the needs of patients through the integrated and patient-centric approach in different settings. Lack of efficient care and support contribute to the fragmentation of patients, families, and community experiences. It increases their risk of harm as a result of poor communication, insufficient health information, inaccurate diagnosis, and preventable hospital admissions. Therefore, coordination of care should be a priority to healthcare service providers to ensure that they address people’s needs effectively. The essay is a critical oral presentation of care coordination to nurses to enhance their ability to provide care coordination to enhance patient outcomes through the collaboration of the patient, family, and the community.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Effective Strategies for Collaborating With Patients and Their Families

Focusing on the Patient

Patient-centric services are correlated to improved patients’ experience, quick recovery, and better quality of life. However, this achievement is obtained when th caregivers coordinate with the patients and their families. When patient-centric care is applied, the patient’s suffering is reduced, mental health improved, and emotional health catered for to enhance quick recovery. If nurses implement patient-centered services, there will be improved patient engagement, quick recovery, high discharge rates, and the reduction costs of serving one patient. For instance, when patients are well informed on their condition, they are less likely to consider elective surgery than those who do not (Stacey et al., 2011). Currently, patients are less involved in making their health decisions. The nurses should seek to improve patient involvement by providing clear information on their health condition and the intervention measures to be taken. Patients will have control of every medical decision made to enhance their satisfaction, and consequently, their recovery.

Establishing Professional Relationships With the Patients

Nurses should seek to build partnerships with patients and their families to enhance a healthy community. Health care services will involve all the stakeholders to provide effective care to the patient. The services should be comprehensive, thorough the holistic involvement of healthcare teams to provide the physical, mental, and psychological needs of the patient and family (Nielsen et al., 2016). This will facilitate prevention, wellness, and care. The partnership will enhance coordination from the hospital, home, and the community to ensure long-term care. Additionally, such a relationship reduced waiting time, easy access to progress, improved communication, and commitment to providing quality and safe healthcare services. Finally, patients and families received personalized care plans, regular medical review, counseling, and patient support (WHO, 2018).

Significant Characteristics of Change Management Affecting the Provision of High-Quality Patient Care

First, the management needs to change its model from functional to process-oriented model to ensure that objectives meet the vision of providing patient-centric care (Vos et al., 2011). Second, organizational units require transformation to focus on specialty based on the healthcare needs of the patients and to enhance effective management of partnerships among specialties. As a result, patients’ allocation will be based on multi-specialty units defined by patients’ clinical needs instead of pathological characteristics. Following this model will achieve the principle of delivery of efficient cure plus concern to patients in the best appropriate care situation based on their wellbeing. Third, high-quality patient-centric care needs integrating, multi-professional, plus multi-specialty care aimed at collaborating to provide holistic care. The management is, therefore, required to have an adequate workforce to establish different teams that will provide holistic healthcare services. Nurses’ positions require reconfiguration from functional to modular nursing.

Fourth, management must readjust its hospital resources, like beds, operating rooms, plus medical equipment to ensure that every team is fully equipped to perform their functional specialties regulated by a centralized logistical model (Liberati et al., 2015). The adjustment will prevent the movement of patients from one department to another. Fifth, the adoption of new managerial responsibilities such as appropriation, timing, flow, as well as coordination of care delivery processes will be necessary (Edwards & McKee, 2002). Such roles will include bed manager, team manager, and case manager. Finally, the hospital may need several changes in its physical environment to capitalize on the available resources to serve the patients based on their health severity and intricacy of the services needed.

The Rationale for Coordinated Care Plans Based on Ethical Decision Making

The ethical principle of justice guides equality and fairness in dealing with all patients. However, nurses should use critical thinking when providing patient-centric care and encounter scarce organizational and patients’ financial resources. Nurses experience the dilemma of what to do due to various challenges when taking care of the patients (Parker, 2007). For instance, a nurse might be caring for a patient whose financial resources are used up, and yet, the patient’s health has not improved and requires more care at the hospital. The nurse will be at an ethical dilemma of what to do. Ethically, the nurse should consult with the management and provide a plan for distributing hospital resources towards caring for the patient.

Knowledge and skills are ethical requirements for nurses to provide effective healthcare services (Parker, 2007). A team is empowered to depend on one another’s knowledge and skills to provide holistic services. Respect for such a team is earned through the delivery of excellent, consistent, and holistic care. Through the team, using evidence-based care through a review of nursing literature and sharing knowledge improves the team’s ability to deal with complex situations to improve patient care. Additionally, nurses must understand ethical principles plus models in healthcare. Such principles include autonomy and beneficence to equip the nurses with the ability to be a team player in the process of decision making in healthcare. Ethical decision making ensures that patients are served in a caring, respectful, and honest way through the application of evidence-based approaches available (Parker, 2007). Coordinate care ensures that the management facilitates discussion on different ethical dilemmas experienced and provide solutions to handle them. As such, the management will be promoting an organizational environment that embraces ethical principles in a methodical way.

The Potential Impact of Specific Health Care Policy Provisions on Outcomes and Patient Experiences

Health care policies are provided in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which stretched health insurance usage to ensure that every patient benefits from healthcare plans. However, the policies have logical implications on the delivery of patient-centered care related to their provisions. Insurers have established narrow networks where they offer medical plans plus policies where patients will receive cheap healthcare by visiting facilities with few doctors and fewer premiums to cut costs. As a result, patients have limited access to quality healthcare, despite having health insurance. According to Michael et al. (2016), insurers were violating ACA policies by limiting the amount of money a patient can use annually on healthcare and often asked patients for cost-sharing. However, this move was cut short when ACA issued regulations to cease from charging higher premiums and denying health coverage to patients due to pre-existing health conditions.

Another potential impact is the establishment of high-deductible bronze plans. The strategy affects populations from low-income communities since it creates an obstruction to access healthcare services. Bronze plans are expensive for most families to afford, limiting them from accessing curative health services. As a result, it is hard for healthcare organizations to implement care coordination services to all patients. Due to these challenges with the insurers, more than 32 million Americans remain uninsured (Blumberg et al., 2016).

The Nurse’s Vital Role in the Coordination and Continuum of Care in a Video-Recorded Presentation

Innovation and Leadership

Nurses portray leadership and innovation through ethical problems-solving skills, adaptability, and engagement in teams to ensure that they achieve a foundation for excellence (ANA Congress on Nursing Practice and Economics). Every nurse should consider themselves as leaders and bearers of the vision of providing patient-centric care through coordination care. To enhance innovation, nurses should embrace the use of evidence-based healthcare practices to improve performance. Additionally, nurses should seek to achieve value in healthcare through an evaluation of patient outcomes. The domains to be used to examine the value include healthcare at home, care plan and follow-up strategies, communication strategies and outcomes, and transitions. When taken seriously, such an evaluation contributes to the evolution of patient care.

Partnership

A nurse should act and behave as a partner in the delivery of care services. The complexity of healthcare requires nurses to work in teams to make sure that holistic care is provided to the sick. Patients require specialized care, and the best care to offer is coordinated care. Therefore, nurses should develop a patient’s care plan in a team for professional advice and approach base on different professional experiences and knowledge.

Conclusion

Coordinated care is a holistic approach that can be achieved through the coordination of all stakeholders involved in healthcare. Nurses should play their part in establishing evidence-based care plans for patients through teamwork. Healthcare organizations should streamline their management to incorporate process-based management. The government should ensure that healthcare policies provide guidelines and regulations to insurers to ensure that every citizen can access both preventive and curative healthcare services. Patients and families are involved in healthcare to ensure that they participate in decision-making process on the best care plans to adopt. Coordinated care is expensive, but worth adopting to ensure a healthy nation.

References

ANA Congress on Nursing Practice and Economics. Care Coordination and Registered Nurses’ Essential Role. Retrieved from https://www.nursingworld.org/~4afbf2/globalassets/practiceandpolicy/health-policy/cnpe-care-coord-position-statement-final--draft-6-12-2012.pdf

Blumberg, L. et al. (2016). Who Are the Remaining Uninsured, and What Do Their Characteristics Tell Us About How to Reach Them? Washington, DC: Urban Institute. Retrieved from http://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/alfresco/publication-pdfs/2000691-Who-Are-The-Remaining-Uninsured-And-What-Do-Their-Characteristics-Tell-Us-About_How-To_Reach_Them.pdf

Edwards, N. & McKee, M. (2002). The future role of the hospital. Journal of Health Services Research Policy, 7(1): 1-2.

Liberati, E. et al. (2015). Reorganizing hospitals to implement a patient-centered model of care. Journal of Health Organization Management, 29: 848-873.

Michael, et al. (2016). Key Provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA): A Systematic Review and Presentation of Early Research Findings. Hea...