5 Ways to Improve Healthcare Coordination in Your Clinic
An effective clinic should provide patients with the type of quality care they need in the fastest possible time. That’s where healthcare coordination should come in as an uncompromisable priority.
Essentially, healthcare coordination refers to the steps, processes, and tools needed to synchronize the delivery of a patient’s health care from multiple providers and specialists. Well-structured coordination enables your team to respond effectively to various market movements and rapidly evolving healthcare demands, fulfilling diverse patient needs most efficiently.
A quality approach to healthcare coordination should also offer the flexibility of efficiently delivering positive change by identifying service or technological gaps and fixing them. Additionally, The National Council for Behavioral Health shares that an estimated 60 percent of adults in the United States have experienced an adverse life event at least once in their lives. These traumatic events affect their level of trust and approach toward engaging healthcare services.
Your clinic can implement the following measures to guide patients in navigating healthcare services, reducing costs, and improving treatment outcomes.
Establish a Transparent Patient-focused Healthcare Plan
A patient-focused healthcare approach identifies the specific treatments and follow-ups that each individual needs. The approach enables your clinic to accurately identify the necessary treatments and specialized consultations to guide patients along their path toward recovery.
In other words, through patient-focused plans, healthcare practitioners can confidently assess issues on the individual level and expedite proper solutions. Particularly, a patient-focused plan helps you zoom in on the most suitable type of healthcare coordination approach, such as the behavioral healthcare integration (BHI) or the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) model. Selecting a suitable care coordination model enables patients to receive quality services through various healthcare settings.
Leverage Specialized Tools for Effective Care Delivery
Well-structured healthcare coordination should empower healthcare providers with the relevant tools to provide quality services within multiple settings.
For example, a clinical event notification (CEN) system can improve decision-making practices by collectively informing/alerting providers about healthcare events based on patient groups. CENs can access insightful clinical data to streamline the management of chronic healthcare conditions. Clinics can also boost their healthcare coordination with other intuitive tools. Specialized solutions enable clinics to frictionlessly access a database of registered nurses, matching industry experience and nursing specializations to patient needs.
Your team may also consider utilizing automation technology in marketing for collecting and analyzing clinic data to refine decision-making processes and improve patient experiences.
Provide Continuity of Services
Impactful healthcare coordination in community clinics should consider medical and non-medical considerations that affect a patient’s health and well-being. Therefore, your clinic needs to assess the comprehensive needs of an individual to establish the type of services they need for optimal outcomes.
Under such a coordinated structure, your clinic should tap into multiple areas of patient care. These may include nursing home arrangements and social service support. Healthcare teams that provide continuity of care prioritize quality patient care solutions aimed at achieving cost-effective and sustainable healthcare for the long term.
Refine Risk Stratification Methods
Strategically coordinated healthcare should prioritize risk stratification practices. These classification methods can improve treatment outcomes, especially for high-risk patients dealing with costly healthcare fees.
A thoughtfully planned risk stratification approach should review the available scientific evidence from clinics (e.g., treatment costs and recovery outcomes) and include expert opinions from healthcare practitioners.
Structuring a feasibility framework based on these factors supports your clinic in assessing, planning, and considering the most critical elements for the optimized implementation of risk stratification.
Prioritize an Interdisciplinary Care Team
You can significantly improve healthcare coordination in private clinics by fostering an interdisciplinary care team that provides comprehensive management of patient needs. Through team-based care, patients can have every aspect of their medical and non-medical demands seamlessly fulfilled.
One effective approach to forming an interdisciplinary care team involves identifying specific roles and responsibilities from the get-go at the individual, group, and organizational levels. Diverse interdisciplinary teams should include specialty physicians, primary care representatives, and PCP support staff.
Delivering Quality Solutions
Effective healthcare coordination in your clinic ensures that patients receive the appropriate care from the right provider at the right time. The methods above can help you establish a reliable system for delivering quality clinical solutions every time. By implementing the measures outlined above, your clinic will be better able to identify specific patient needs and anticipate the most suitable treatments for proactive healthcare coordination — you will also keep your clinic steps ahead in resolving the most urgent patient demands.