The Importance Of Clinical Integration In Healthcare

In healthcare, we are accustomed to changes that are usually made in hopes of improving quality of patients care. A way to improve quality of care is through joint projects. Joint projects come in different forms, such as clinical team working together to provide patient care after discharge. Also, joint projects are when a healthcare facility work with a clinical team. These partnerships could be seen as helping improve the quality of care.

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An integrated physician model can be described as the clinical team coming together in an entire field of care that follows the patients wherever they go. For example, an organization following an integrated physician model could include acute care hospitals, nursing homes, affiliated medical groups,

Clinical integration is needed to enable the coordination of patient care across conditions, providers, settings, and time in order to reach the care that is safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable, and patient-focused. However, to achieve clinical integration, we need to encourage changes in provider culture, redesign payment methods and incentives, and update federal laws Also, clinical integration provides an opportunity to organize services through centralized scheduling, electronic health records, clinical pathways, management of chronic diseases, and innovative quality improvement programs (Harrison, 2016). Also, strategic planning is important in clinical integration because it outlines what is expected between the hospitals and physicians. Many healthcare facilities have limited resources, consequently, it is crucial to guarantee that capital spending needs and operating performance measures of physician’s strategies can be identified and calculated before a partnership is made. Also, clinically integrated care community needs good governance, where the goals and incentives of leadership and management are associated (Health, 2017). Furthermore, an important area to focus on is creating a physician-led culture of continuous quality improvement, using tools and technology to integrate information from different systems

Accountable care organizations (ACOs) are a new approach to organizing medical care and financing to achieve the of higher quality care, decreased costs, and improved population health. In ACOs, health care providers and in many circumstances, have hospitals share accountability for the health outcomes and expenditures of their patients (DeCamp, 2014). Also, these networks can help coordinate patient care, and provide networks with incentives for quality of care. Also, it helps keeps patients out of the hospital by staying healthy. Also, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have formed a Medicare Shared Service Program, that helps distribute the fee-for -service (Harrison, 2016). Many alternative approaches used in the current health system is bundled payments (Mulestein, 2017). Under bundled episode payments providers receive a predetermined amount for all the care related to a specific condition, such as a knee replacement, over a specified time period. Also, bundles make available a financial incentive to manage proficiently a patient’s treatment during the entire episode of care across multiple providers, giving providers flexibility in the resources they use all through the episode (Mulestein,