Introduction
The importance of care coordination in achieving a high-quality, high-value, patient-centered health care system is generally acknowledged. Improving care coordination is vital to stakeholders at multiple levels within health care systems. For example, for policymakers who want to deliver high-quality, high-value care to individual patients; doctors who wish to provide high-quality service to individual patients; and finally, patients and their families, who experience the benefits or shortfalls of coordination and frequently play an active role in it (Bean, 2017). It can be seen that care coordination is a vital process in the health care system since it impacts all its levels. Tactfulness, politeness, and a sincere desire to help the patient should be shown in every action of a medical worker.
Cooperation strategies for patients and their families
Involving patients and their families in all endeavors is one of the most important strategies in this field. Patient engagement initiatives must eventually pervade every element of the hospital or practice. Patient and family relations should not be seen as an afterthought; instead, they should be a part of what clinical leaders do. The best particular ways to promote patient and family involvement will be determined by healthcare institutions (Goodridge et al., 2018). Employees, patients, and family members are all taken into account when cultural changes are made. Changes might range from enhancing office efficiency to increasing care team members’ interactions with patients and families to establishing overall decision methods that give insight and value to the treatment for each patient.
Partnering with patients and their families can be another useful strategy in care coordination. Consumer consultation will be crucial in efforts to enhance interactions with patients and their families. Patients and families should be asked to provide information so that health organizations may better understand their requirements, as well as where there are gaps in treatment and possibilities for improvement (Goodridge et al., 2018). Clinical leaders and staff cannot just create their own agendas without first learning what patients want from their own healthcare.
To obtain patient input, healthcare institutions can employ focus groups, improvement groups, patient experience surveys, and patient and family counselling recommendations. Organizations can also allocate one staff person to interview patients and family members during room time (Goodridge et al., 2018). Interviews can be formatted by member staff to collect what patients want the practitioner to accomplish that she isn’t already doing.
Lastly, cultural coordination strategies can be identified in patient-centered care. In this field, the most important strategy would be to find out each patient cultural background, assess the sensitivity issue within patients’ culture and social norms. In this regard, it will be beneficial to hire bilingual (or multilingual) staff and employ diversity training sessions within nursing personnel. The medical interventions should be conducted only after assessing the cultural background and ethnic issues of each patient.
Aspects of change management essential to the provision of patient-centered care
Patients are partners in patient-centered healthcare organizations, and human connection is the backbone of their services. Patient voice and healthcare experience are increasingly being demanded in terms of organizational quality improvement as healthcare focuses on patient-centered service delivery and how to offer it (Fiorio et al., 2018). Patients are evaluated on interpersonal aspects of their medical experience, such as enabling their health care provider to ask questions, their degree of engagement in their own treatment, and if their health care provider was pleasant, respectful, and listened to them.
A strong change management plan may help companies avoid issues like low productivity, staff turnover, high-stress levels, and a detrimental impact on patients as a result of the change. It’s critical to ensure the success of healthcare reform because if reform fails or leaves some individuals confused between the old and new ways of development, the costs can be quite expensive and have a negative impact on patient care.
One of the essential aspects of change management is communication planning and sponsorship roadmaps. Both have a direct impact on patients, therefore improvements in both areas must be carefully handled in order to offer patient-centered care. Inviting suggestions from various levels and conducting regular formal and informal meetings are two possible tactics in this respect. It’s also crucial to handle a person’s shift expectations with caution.
Ethical decision making of care managers
Concerns arise regarding how care managers strive to strike a balance between professional autonomy and loyalty and how they deal with defining the parameters of their professional duties (Tonnessen et al., 2017). In their interactions with patients and immediate family members, they also strive to strike a balance between distance and proximity. Both on a personal and organizational level, this might be perceived as a misalignment of roles. Role conflicts emerge when these expectations are mutually incompatible, and the role they play is described as a collection of behaviors, rights, norms, and duties in connection to how professionals are expected to act in line with their position in the company.
Any healthcare professional must have ethical principles. The nurse must have a high degree of respect for all persons and ensure that care and communication are conducted in a dignified manner. It is critical that patients’ family are treated with respect because of their bond with the patient. The patient should always be the most important consideration. The nurse must realize the importance of incorporating the patient’s unique perspective into the care process. As a result, coordinated strategies should be developed in line with ethical principles such as autonomy, beneficence, justice, and abnormality.
The impact of specific health care policy
Specific health care policy provisions can impact patient-centered care in different ways. For example, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has become the most significant healthcare reform bill in the United States, affecting millions of people. Expanding access to insurance, enhancing client protection, and preventative exams to control rising healthcare expenses were some of the major pillars of this ACA. When many people got health insurance, the ACA heavily affected the health care policy.
Another way is to impose partial coverage of healthcare on the patients themselves. In principle, asking patients to shoulder part of the financial burden of their care will drive them to make better health decisions. These patients will, in theory, remain on top of their chronic illness management programs, take preventative measures, and make more cost-effective treatment selections (Kominski et al., 2017). Patient-centered care is emphasized in the pursuit of value-based reimbursement and public health management, and healthcare providers design their own patient engagement methods because they have financial incentives to do so.
Conclusion
Comprehensive attempts to improve care coordination need a combination of measures that go beyond illness treatment have been made. Managing care throughout the transition to long-term care or better-integrating care into specific provider settings are only some examples among many. These methods should address the ongoing fragmentation of care coordination by requiring payers and providers from all sectors of the health care system to work together to make treatment more patient-centered and interdisciplinary. This necessitates the creation and testing of innovative health care delivery and payment models, which, together with regular reporting on performance metrics, are required for progress in policy impact assessment.
References
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