<h2>CONTINUITY OF CARE</h2>

Examples of Continuity of Care

1. An unhappy example of no continuity of care - the lack of communication between patients and their care teams and between each provider's care teams:

A very real example of the problem with lack of communication between patients and their healthcare teams

2. A happy example when continuity of care works as it should:

A happy example of effective care coordination

Scroll down the linked page to find the story of Ms. H.

Financial Implications of the Continuity of Primary Care

Click HERE for the full paper

A brief tip for reading journal papers: read the abstract first (see immediately below). It may be all you want to read and need to read. However, if you want to verify the veracity of the paper, you have go through the whole thing carefully and consider if the methods are good enough, the analysis is logical, and if the conclusion follows.

Click HERE for a pop-up of the abstract ABSTRACT
scroll down to see full window

• Background: The objective of this study was to assess the financial implications of the continuity of care, for patients with high care needs, by examining the cost of government-funded health care services in British Columbia, Canada.
• Methods: Using British Columbia Ministry of Health administrative databases for fiscal year 2010-2011 and generalized linear models, we estimated cost ratios for 10 cost-related predictor variables, including patients' attachment to the practice. Patients were selected and divided into groups on the basis of their Resource Utilization Band (RUB) and placement in provincial registries for 8 chronic conditions (1,619,941 patients). The final dataset included all high- and very-high-care-needs patients in British Columbia (ie, RUB categories 4 and 5) in 1 or more of the 8 registries who met the screening criteria (222,779 patients).
• Results: Of the 10 predictors, across 8 medical conditions and both RUBs, patients' attachment to the practice had the strongest relationship to costs (correlations = -0.168 to -0.322). Higher attachment was associated with lower costs. Extrapolation of the findings indicated that an increase of 5% in the overall attachment level, for the selected high-care-needs patients, could have resulted in an estimated cost avoidance of $142 million Canadian for fiscal year 2010-2011.
• Conclusions: Continuity of care, defined as a patient's attachment to his/her primary care practice, can reduce health care costs over time and across chronic conditions. Health care policy makers may wish to consider creating opportunities for primary care physicians to increase the attachment that their high-care-needs patients have to their practices.

FOR PROFESSIONALS

Reducing Care Fragmentation from the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute
http://www.improvingchroniccare.org/index.php?p=Care_Coordination&s=326