Achieving Integrated Care as the Foundation of Population Health Management

As Healthcare providers struggle to improve services while keeping costs down, many are turning to the concept of Integrated Care for help.

Integrated care — healthcare that crosses organisational boundaries and different care settings, bringing together all parties involved in delivering healthcare through the sharing of information is the goal of health systems worldwide.

Many of the challenges facing healthcare globally are underpinned or driven by fragmented healthcare services and tackling these challenges requires re-architecting care delivery models. One of the most complex and critical aspects of this is building an IT infrastructure that enables all participants in the healthcare system to access and share the information they need, and to streamline and automate their processes to ensure the most efficient clinical and administrative workflows.

To deliver truly integrated care, and build an enabling information technology platform there are six key (non-linear) steps to follow:

I. Acquisition: Acquiring data from disparate information systems and care locations. 
Many clinical systems format, store and share data in different ways. To get the complete picture of an individual’s health, an IT system needs to enable data acquisition for accurate and reliable interoperability with a wide array of systems.

II. Aggregation: Secure storage of structured, normalised and identified data. 
Each of the systems contributing data to a healthcare network has its particular characteristics and conventions for formatting and sharing data. The data that needs to be aggregated must include systems for identity management and terminology services to ensure normalisation of data across multiple systems.

III. Analytics: Tools for risk identification, management and quality improvement. Mining data for views into population health and finding the actionable insights that can drive improvements to quality and efficiency drive the need for analytics as a fundamental component of a successful integrated health network.

IV. Access: Fast, easy and convenient access to information for the entire circle of care. Clinicians, administrators, patients, family members and many others need secure access to various aspects of a healthcare network’s data. Each have their own unique set of priorities, permissions and technical sophistication level to consider, but for all of them, access to data must be as frictionless as possible to support initial and ongoing adoption.

V. Action: Turning information and insights into activities and outcomes. A key technology requirement is coordinated workflow tools that enable care managers to deploy consistent care pathways based on patient and population data, and to document and communicate progress with 
the healthcare providers and patients they support.

VI. Adoption: User engagement and adoption of tech. Adoption is as much an issue of technical prowess as it is an emotional and behavioural one. If clinicians and care coordinators fail to adopt, key information will not be used for decision-making and outcomes will suffer.

We have entered a new era in healthcare where we are orienting our health system around the patient. To deliver care that best serves individuals, we must promote the bringing together of services and systems across the health spectrum.

Healthcare IT has a huge part to play in the seamless integration of our healthcare systems and adopting the right strategy — and making the right investment — is crucial to generating improved outcomes — both clinical and financial. To find out how these six steps to Integrated Care can be implemented in your organisation visit orionhealth.com/au.

» For more information visit orionhealth.com/au