Summary
Care coordination improves patient outcomes while reducing care costs, and nurses play a powerful role in ensuring patients receive quality health services and patient-centered care. Nurses should recognize the importance of care coordination on patient outcomes and determine the aspects necessary for care management. When nurses share medical information concerning patient health conditions with other professionals, decision-making and medications for that disease become easy. Care coordination involves knowledge sharing, collaboration, transition care, and supporting patients in care management. Therefore, care coordination improves population health and patient experience and reduces medical costs.
Effective Strategies for Collaborating with Patients and their Families to Achieve Desired Health Outcomes
Integrating patient and family engagement into healthcare policies and practices is a critical strategy for ensuring a quality patient outcome. Engaging patients and families during decision-making can help identify improvement areas and any barriers that undermine collaboration. The creation of job descriptions should incorporate patient and family cooperation to raise awareness of the recruitment and hiring processes. In this case, patients and families know the expected behavior and can act as a reference for analyzing and rewarding performances (Matthys et al., 2017). Healthcare professionals should be regularly reminded of the importance of engaging patients and families in their everyday jobs.
Involving patients and families in the hiring process, including interviews, can help them discuss or send a powerful message to the recruits about the value of collaborating with them. Compensating and recognizing staff members who value and promote patient and family engagement is another strategy for increasing collaboration. Programs including an employee of the month, mentioning the most performing healthcare professionals, patients, and families in newsletters, and other rewards can promote cooperation between healthcare professionals, patients, and families.
Providing necessary infrastructure and resources for patient and family collaboration is essential for promoting patient and family engagement. The healthcare setting should allocate resources needed for maintaining patient and family engagement by creating a healthcare structure that values and ensures responsibility and accountability for all. Setting up a small office and electing officials to manage and provide patient and family-centered care is a critical aspect to consider (Matthys et al., 2017).
Healthcare staff should also be given enough time, and resources, including financial support, to develop, integrate and train other employees on family advisory and establish patient and family councils to guide and monitor performance. Healthcare leaders have the opportunity to provide educational training on how to collaborate effectively with patients and families successfully.
The Aspects of Change Management that Directly Affect Elements of the Patient Experience
Patient experience is linked to patient satisfaction and is a metric for measuring the patient’s quality of care. Patient safety, patient engagement, access to healthcare services, patient-centered communication, and patients’ health literacy are critical aspects of change management that directly affect the patient experience. When a patient receives high-quality care services, experience improves and trust in healthcare settings (Peterson et al., 2019). A collection of patient experiences can evaluate the level and quality of care administered in a specific healthcare unit. Change management is designed to foster innovation and determine new ways of doing things while maintaining patient safety, collaboration, access to healthcare resources, and educating patients and families on health matters.
A systematic and organized approach optimizes patient care and fosters a culture of safe, quality care and transparency. Improving healthcare systems and care processes minimizes risks associated with system failure and redundancy. A proactive approach, including improved processes, prevents errors before they occur, and efficiency eliminates wasteful activities related to clinical tools and devices. A cost-effective system improves patient outcomes and provides a reliable and less expensive process (Peterson et al., 2019). A healthcare setting that provides patients with safety, care management, cost-effective, patient-centered, and effective services improves the quality of patient care.
The rationale for Coordinated Care Plans Based on Ethical Decision Making
Coordinated care aims to provide patient satisfaction and quality health care for patients with long-term and complicated health problems in various services and settings. Healthcare settings should have the infrastructure and resources, including ethical consultation services, procedures, guidelines, policies, and ethics committees, to help decision-making. An ethical approach to providing patient care ensures patients and families support healthcare standards and regulations undertaken by health officials (Voumard et al., 2018).
Understanding a particular healthcare setting community can help form ethical decisions to improve patient health outcomes, eliminate redundant tests and reduce healthcare costs. Therefore, ethical decision-making is a critical aspect when providing coordinated care plans to ensure that quality and safer health care practices are implemented for a quality patient outcome.
Potential Impact of Specific Health Care Policy Provisions on Outcomes and Patient Experiences
The Affordable Care Act of 2010 enhanced access to health insurance coverage by reforming the private insurance market. ACA ensures that the working poor has access to Medicaid and transforms the way healthcare decisions are made. In the United States, those individuals with income below 133% of the federal poverty have enrolled for insurance coverage which has improved the health status of many in the US (McKenna et al., 2018).
The act provides a platform where people use services without out-of-pocket costs, which has enhanced wellness, chronic disease checking, and screening, preventing health problems before they become a burden or costly emergencies. Health insurance helps prevent illness because it is easy for an individual to identify the disease early due to annual checkups, blood tests, and lab work, and vaccinations covered under the insurance. The insurance provides a person with the ability to manage any chronic disease, including heart disease, diabetes, and depression. Most importantly, young adults are subject to routine and preventive care, which keeps them healthy and thriving.
Before the Affordable Care Act, most health plans limited the amount of money it could cover on a person’s medication annually. Upon reaching the set limit, the rest of the expenses were out-of-pocket, but the Affordable Care Act has managed to eliminate the health plans that limit the amount of money spent on an individual (Alvarez et al., 2018). If a person is enrolled on a health plan, the insurance should cover the entire expenses without limiting spending on an individual. Health conditions should not alter the health plan benefits to an individual, and it applies to self-insured, grandfathered, and new individual plans. Therefore, children with health conditions should not be denied access to health plan benefits, and their health conditions should not be an excuse for particular coverage.
The Nurse’s Vital Role in The Coordination and Continuum of Care
Care coordination is a basis for achieving a quality patient care outcome and the triple aim of the health reform, which includes reducing patient per capita costs, improving population health and enhancing satisfaction and quality care. When nurses coordinate with other professionals, including pharmacists, and social workers, it is easy to monitor care and generate an accurate report. Nurse relationships with others provide confidence and self-managing care, reduce emergency visits, reduce clinical costs, and improve survival rates (Swan et al., 2019).
Sharing information concerning patient care with other professionals can help improve patient outcomes and make easy decision making. Nurses can also support patients by connecting them with community resources and providing guidelines on care management. Therefore, care coordination is crucial in improving patient outcomes and increasing awareness in a healthcare setting.
References
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McKenna, R. M., Langellier, B. A., Alcalá, H. E., Roby, D. H., Grande, D. T., & Ortega, A. N. (2018). The affordable care act attenuates financial strain according to poverty level. Inquiry: A Journal of Medical Care Organization, Provision, And Financing, 55, 46958018790164. Web.
Peterson, K., Anderson, J., Bourne, D., Charms, M. P., Gorin, S. S., Hynes, D. M.,… & Yano, E. M. (2019). Health care coordination theoretical frameworks: A systematic scoping review to increase their understanding and use in practice. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 34(1), 90-98. Web.
Swan, B. A., Haas, S., & Jessie, A. T. (2019). Care coordination: Roles of registered nurses across the care continuum. Nursing Economics, 37(6), 317-323. Web.
Voumard, R., Truchard, E. R., Benaroyo, L., Borasio, G. D., BĂĽla, C., & Jox, R. J. (2018). Geriatric palliative care: A view of its concept, challenges, and strategies. BMC Geriatrics, 18(1), 1-6. Web.