Introduction
Care coordination is a concept aimed at the advancement of safety and quality of patient care. It is widely used in many healthcare organizations and is said to be an effective tool for enhancing patient satisfaction. Therefore, care coordination seems to be a well-developed concept for constant improvement of patient care, though the outcomes of using this framework do not demonstrate a positive impact.
Purpose of AHRQ’s in Care Coordination and Quality Outcomes
In modern times health care has become more patient-centered, which requires developing new approaches to handling health problems. Care coordination refers to the arrangement of patient care activities and dissemination of information among the participants of the care process to enhance the safety and effectiveness of care (AHRQ, 2018). This framework aims at ensuring that patients’ needs are known beforehand and communicated timely to relevant healthcare professionals (AHRQ, 2018). Here, information and its timely delivery are of great importance because it determines the quality of care and patient satisfaction.
Care coordination quality depends on the appropriateness of care activities. According to AHRQ (2018), there are two directions of measures, including the utilization of broad and commonly accepted approaches to advance care delivery and the application of specific activities. In view of this, the organization constantly adapts its conceptual framework of care coordination quality with the help of the defined set of measures and surveys of patients (AHRQ, 2018). These tools facilitate considering new challenges in healthcare delivery and developing actions to mitigate them and improve quality. Thus, the organization emphasizes the crucial role of care coordination activities as the most proper way to enhance the quality of care.
Article Review
Despite the value put into care coordination, it is still important to investigate whether this conceptual framework is effective in practice. The article to be reviewed deals with the evaluation of mobile predictive intervention in terms of a decrease in hospital utilization (Quinn et al., 2021). The intervention lasted five months and involved eleven Service Coordinators (SCs) and 420 Long-Term Services and Supports (LTSS) clients of similar age, race, and duration of using LTSS (Quinn et al., 2021). Although technology-based interventions are believed to reduce healthcare costs, the study outcomes show neutral views of SCs on the interventions as they have not significantly improved healthcare utilization among surveyed LTSS clients.
In this type of intervention, the care coordinator should fulfill different roles. For instance, the nurse serves as an advocate for services and the development of self-management skills in patients (Quinn et al., 2021). As a coach, the health care worker helps the patient to set personal tasks for health improvement. Since the technologies are involved in the care process, it requires the health care worker to play a role of a change agent, who can guide changes in the appropriate direction.
In addition, the care coordinator should always consider costs related to patient care and healthcare facility. The main task is always to minimize both expenditure categories. Since the results of the intervention did not have a dramatic impact in terms of using the emergency department or readmission, it means that the costs will remain at the same or higher level for both patients and the medical organization (Quinn et al., 2021). Because healthcare facilities should follow their cost-containment objectives, it can lead to various ethical challenges regarding patients. For example, limited costs can undermine the nurse’s professional abilities to deliver proper care. However, one of the most serious events is early discharge because patients do not have their needs met completely, and this can cause severe aggravation of health condition.
Conclusion
To conclude, care coordination may seem to be an overestimated conceptual framework for enhancing patient care. Although it utilizes a variety of tools to address challenges in care delivery and patient satisfaction, it cannot help to achieve significant results. In this regard, care coordination activities require continuous review of quality measures to adapt health care delivery to differentiated patients’ needs.
References
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. (2018). Care coordination. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Web.
Quinn, C. C., Knopp, K. L., Marsiglia, C. A., Bearch, R. C., LeFever, A., Barr, E. A., Liang, Y., & Gruber-Baldini, A. L. (2021). Mobile technology care coordination of long-term services and support: cluster randomized clinical trial. Journal of Applied Gerontology, 40(5), pp. 529-535. Web.