What Would A Community Care Plan Look Like?

Recently, I wrote an article about the benefits of a longitudinal patient record and community care plan to patient care. I picked up the idea from a piece by an Orion Health exec touting the benefits of these models. Interestingly, I couldn’t find a specific definition for a community care plan in the article — nor could I dig anything up after doing a Google search — but I think the idea is worth exploring nonetheless.

Presumably, if we had a community care plan in place for each patient, it would have interlocking patient-specific and population health-level elements to it. (To my knowledge, current population health models don’t do this.) Rather than simply handing patients off from one provider to another, in the hope that the rare patient-centered medical home could manage their care effectively on its own, it might set care goals for each patient as part of the larger community strategy.

With such a community care strategy, groups of providers would have a better idea where to allocate resources. It would simultaneously meet the goals of traditional medical referral patterns, in which clinicians consult with one another on strategy, and help them decide who to hire (such as a nurse-practitioner to serve patient clusters with higher levels of need).

As I envision it, a community care plan would raise the stakes for everyone involved in the care process. Right now, for example, if a primary care doctor refers a patient to a podiatrist, on a practical level the issue of whether the patient can walk pain-free is not the PCP’s problem. But in a community-based care plan, which help all of the individual actors be accountable, that podiatrist couldn’t just examine the patient, do whatever they did and punt. They might even be held to quantitative goals, if the they were appropriate to the situation.

I also envision a community care plan as involving a higher level of direct collaboration between providers. Sure, providers and specialists coordinate care across the community, minimally, but they rarely talk to each other, and unless they work for the same practice or health system virtually never collaborate beyond sharing care documentation. And to be fair, why should they? As the system exists today, they have little practical or even clinical incentive to get in the weeds with complex individual patients and look at their future. But if they had the right kind of community care plan in place for the population, this would become more necessary.

Of course, I’ve left the trickiest part of this for last. This system I’ve outlined, basically a slight twist on existing population health models, won’t work unless we develop new methods for sharing data collaboratively — and for reasons I be glad to go into elsewhere, I’m not bullish about anything I’ve seen. But as our understanding of what we need to get done evolves, perhaps the technology will follow. A girl can hope.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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