Embracing Integrated Care for Improved Patient Outcomes
- By Patrick M. Schmidt
TODAY, INTEGRATED CARE is a worldwide trend. The World Health Organization defines integrated care as “a concept bringing together inputs, delivery, management and organization of services related to diagnosis, treatment, care, rehabilitation and health promotion. Integration is a means to improve services in relation to access, quality, user satisfaction and efficiency.” Indeed, integrated care is needed now more than ever to bring together an exchange of ideas among academics, researchers, clinicians, policymakers, and users and providers of services to improve patient care. Implementation of this concept is the focus of many of the articles in this edition.
As healthcare becomes more complicated with an ever-growing number of discoveries about diseases, many of which are rare, a lack of integrated care can often result in misdiagnoses. As we point out in our article “The Misdiagnosis Dilemma,” as many as 88 percent of patients who seek a second opinion receive a significantly different diagnosis, which can generate not only psychosocial health implications, but enormous economic consequences when expensive treatments are involved. The problem is caused by many factors, but the complexity of conditions and the time constraints pressuring physicians play significant roles. The key, say health experts, is education. Providers need to be open to integrating care with other physicians for second opinions in complex cases. And, insurance companies play a crucial role when recognizing that a second opinion ensures a correct diagnosis, which is always in the best interest of patient care and can curb care costs in the long run.
Current healthcare is not only more complicated, it’s becoming more sophisticated, resulting in once-terminal patients living longer with diseases due to better treatments. A case in point is human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). In our article “Growing Old with HIV,” we relate the increased risk of HIV for older adults, who make up more than half of all people living with HIV today, and who, increasingly, are being diagnosed at an older age due to changes in lifestyle and misperceptions about their risk of contracting the disease. This uptick in HIV among older adults creates unique challenges for healthcare professionals who may not regularly address sexual health risk behaviors with older patients. Recognition of HIV as a significant risk to older adults has resulted in improved integrated care strategies with new monitoring tools and better training for healthcare providers.
Researchers also play a critical role in the integration of care by studying the benefits of current treatments for a host of diseases that have not responded to conventional treatments and are not approved therapy by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. As we highlight in our article “Expanding Uses of IVIG,” this is increasingly true for intravenous immune globulin (IVIG) therapy. Several studies indicate IVIG may show promise in treating diseases such as lupus, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, dysautonomia and infertility.
As always, we hope you enjoy this issue of BioSupply Trends Quarterly, and find it both relevant and helpful to your practice.
Helping Healthcare Care,
Patrick M. Schmidt
Publisher
