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 Well-coordinated care can help make medicine safer and more
efficient, researchers note in the Annals of Family Medicine.
Coordination between primary care providers and specialists can lead
to fewer hospitalizations, but it can also require patients to have
frequent contact with healthcare providers.
Roughly one in 10 U.S. patients experience numerous gaps in care
coordination, which is about double the proportion across all 11
countries in the study.
Patients were less likely to have gaps in care coordination when
their primary care physician knew them well and they didn’t have
multiple chronic medical problems, the study also found.
“It shouldn’t be a surprise that having a good relationship with a
primary care doctor helps care coordination,” said Timothy Hoff, a
researcher at Northeastern University in Boston and author of a
forthcoming book titled, “Next in Line: Lowered Care Expectations in
the Age of Retail- and Value-Based Health.”
“Care coordination is more about the doctor being willing to go the
extra mile for the patient than anything else, and a good
relationship encourages that extra effort,” Hoff, who wasn’t
involved in the study, said by email.
For the study, Jonathan Penm of the University of Sydney, Australia
and colleagues examined survey data from almost 14,000 adults in
Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand,
Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the U.S.
Survey respondents described their experiences with five potential
gaps in coordination between primary care and specialty practices in
the previous two years: primary care doctors lacking test results or
medical records; receiving conflicting information; primary care
doctors ordering a test patients thought was unnecessary;
specialists lacking medical information or test results from
patients' regular doctor; and regular doctor not up to date on care
provided by specialists.
Researchers counted patients as experiencing poor primary care
coordination when survey participants reported at least three of
these five issues.
Overall, one third of participants reported at least one care
coordination gap, and 5 percent had at least three gaps.
When people did have at least three gaps, they were more than three
times as likely to be hospitalized and more than twice as likely to
visit the emergency department, the study found.
Compared with adults 65 and older in the study, younger patients in
their 20s and 30s were more likely to report gaps in care
coordination, researchers also found.
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One limitation of the study is that just 23 percent of people
invited to complete the survey agreed to do so, the authors note.
Researchers also lacked country-specific data to help examine the
reasons some nations had better care coordination than others.
In the U.S., it’s likely that a lack of insurance or the cost of
treatment contributes to poor care coordination, said Dr. Asaf
Bitton, a researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard
Medical School in Boston who wasn’t involved in the study.
“Care coordination assumes that a person has some sort of minimal
access to affordable health care,” Bitton said by email. “When a
person is uninsured or underinsured, they will avoid often necessary
care.”
The study results for U.S. patients aren’t surprising, said Dr. Kurt
Stange, a researcher at Case Western Reserve University in
Cleveland, Ohio, who wasn’t involved in the study.
“What is surprising is that we keep investing in the fragmented
parts of care - delivery of individual commodities of
disease-specific health care – and then expect the whole - the
integrated care and health of people and families - to get better,”
Stange said by email.
Better care coordination in other countries suggests that supporting
doctor-patient relationships matters, Stange added.
“Investment in relationships is a vital resource that enables care
to be coordinated,” Stange said. “Investment in relationships has
many other pay-offs as well.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/PsTJfI Annals of Family Medicine, online March
13, 2017.
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