Care coordination involves planning patient care activities and giving all persons concerned with a patient’s affairs to attain safer and more efficient care. The patient’s preferences and needs are known and communicated to the person involved at the right time, and data is used to give appropriate, effective, and safe care to the patient. The primary goal of care coordination is to provide quality and valuable health care to the patient.
Care coordination is practiced all over the care continuum. Example of care coordination includes; First, Primary Care Coordination; Organizations might use a guided primary care approach that has a fundamental responsibility for persons with chronic healthcare conditions. Nurses collaborate with specialty providers and primary caregivers to provide quality services. Primary care coordination reduces the cost of treatment. Second, acute Care Coordination. The acute care coordinator supervises the transition of care, from filling prescriptions and follow-up visits to confirm any patients’ instructions. Acute care coordination reduces mortality rate, lastly, post-acute care coordination (Parsons et al., 2021). When patients are also inhabitants in health care facilities, a transformation between magnitudes of care includes changes in pharmaceutical and care plans. Care coordinators in this situation work with caregivers and patients to ensure the care program has reasonable assumptions and champions for maintaining fine patient quality of life.
Successful coordinated care contains several elements: Simple and precise data that patients and families can understand, effective care plan transitions and good communication between providers, easy availability to a range of health care providers and services, and a focus on the maximum health care desires the patients.
Care Coordination Process
The care coordination process should primarily use the principles from care management, care coordination, and population health for quality health outcomes. The care coordination process has six phases: Data analysis, selection, assessment, planning, interventions, and valuation. There are two significant ways to attain coordinated care; Broad approaches and distinct care coordination practices (Rossiter, Levett-Jones, & Pich, 2020). Examples of broad approaches in care coordination include; Teamwork, medication management, patient-centered medical home, care management, and health information technology. Examples of distinct care coordination include; Communicating knowledge, Assessing patients’ goals and needs, helping with transformation of care, creating a proactive care plan, connecting to community resources, reinforcing patients’ self-monitoring targets, creating a dynamic care program, working to position resources with population and patient need.
Strategies essential for achieving quality desired health outcomes
In a value-based hospital, consequences are fundamental than anything else. Expected results are achievable and real for health facility survival (Musen, Middleton & Greenes, 2021). Some of the strategies worth achieving desired health outcomes include:
Care coordination is a fundamental aspect of every health care system. Care coordination is a primary strategy that can improve effectiveness, improve safety, and improve the efficiency of the health care system. Well-targeted and designed care coordination also enhances the outcome of a care provider, patients, and payer. However, care coordination has barriers and facilitators that impact care coordination. Factors that impact coordinated care occur in three levels: Interpersonal level, system/organization level, and individual level. Some facilitators and barriers include efficiency of medical information technology, interactions with patients, accessibility of community assets, interactions with health care provisions and clinicians, and self-care activities for wellness and mental health (Allen et al., 2019). Care coordination is practiced all over the care continuum.
Care coordination has numerous impacts on patients’ outcomes such as, provides referral clarity: Patients may be given a referral from their primary caregiver to a specialist. Care coordination helps in the appointment-making process; care coordination also guides the vital step of things to do after being attended by the specialist. Secondly, prevent information loss: Essential data may be lost because referral staff deals with different activities and providers. Care coordination prevents mix-ups involving lost information, ensuring health care is as effective as possible. Lastly, eliminate disjointed: care Systems in the healthcare institutions can be disconnected, especially between specialty and primary care sites. Care coordination helps to align the differences and make the situation be like a continuum.
Care coordination also helps to improve the use of drugs. There are different strategies attached to care coordination that fuel improved use of medicines. Such methods include; Formulary manuals, standard treatment guidelines (STGs), face-to-face communication, medicine control and restriction, audit, and feedback (DUEs), in-service education programs, pharmaceutical newsletters and bulletins, clinical Pharmacy programs, and professional licensing and medicine registration (Malik, 2020). Illogical medicine use can greatly affect the patients, families, and entire population. Some of the repercussions of irrational medicine use are waste of resources, increased mortality and morbidity, increased cases of unfavorable medicine reaction, increased infectious sicknesses because of unnecessary and contaminated immunization, and antimicrobial defiance through overuse and misuse.
Significant elements of effective patient-centered care strategies:
Family and patients’ values, preferences, cultural traditions, and socioeconomic situations are valued.
Nursing Ethics
Ethics are moral principles that control how a group of people will behave or act in particular circumstances. Consequences and implications of an ethical approach to care include; Beneficence; nurses have to intensely work in a way to benefit patients, society, and community. Justice, health caregivers, should ensure healthcare burdens and benefits are shared relatively in the entire population. Non-maleficence, Nurses should not inflict harm or allow anybody to inflict damage to the patients, and Autonomy, Caregivers, should respect their patients. Nurses are responsible to their profession, themselves, and patients to sustain the best ethical principles. Nurses should be aware of the Code of Ethics and know their integrity and moral behavior in their careers.