The Institute of Medicine has identified care coordination as a key component of strategies to improve the effectiveness, safety, and efficiency of the American health care system.1 Care coordination involves deliberately organizing patient care activities and sharing information among all of the participants concerned with a patient’s care to achieve safer and more effective care. Achieving coordinated care typically involves specific care coordination activities, such as creating a proactive plan of care and sharing information across providers and sites of care, and using broad approaches that are commonly used to improve health care delivery (for example, team work and health information technology). Well-designed, targeted care coordination can improve outcomes for everyone: patients, providers, and payers. Care coordination is particularly critical for people living with multiple chronic conditions.
While the need for care coordination is clear, it can be challenging for primary care practices to assess the quality of their existing care coordination activities, identify gaps, and determine where improvements are needed. One aspect of the challenges facing practices is that there are many definitions of care coordination and few agreed-upon measures to guide implementation and evaluation of effective care coordination efforts. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has developed 2 resources to fill this gap:
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The Care Coordination Measures Atlas presents a framework that identifies key domains for measuring care coordination and their relationship to potentially measurable effects. The Atlas also measures care coordination from the perspectives of patients and caregivers, as well as from the perspectives of health care professionals and health system managers. The Atlas is available at http://www.ahrq.gov/professionals/systems/long-term-care/index.html.
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Building on the Atlas, AHRQ has created the Care Coordination Measures Database to further assist evaluators and researchers interested in care coordination measurement. Users can compare more than 80 validated tools and search by coordination activities, approaches, or individual perspective, eg, patient/family, health care professional, or health system representative. The database may be accessed on the AHRQ website.
For additional information about AHRQ’s efforts in this area, visit AHRQ’s Care Coordination page: http://www.ahrq.gov/professionals/prevention-chronic-care/index.html, and AHRQ’s Innovations Exchange: http://www.innovations.ahrq.gov/. The Innovations Exchange is a one-stop resource that offers health professionals and researchers opportunities to share, learn about, and adopt a diverse array of evidence-based innovations and tools that can speed the implementation of new and better ways to deliver health care.
- © 2014 Annals of Family Medicine, Inc.