Expert’s Guide To Continuity Of Care
Continuity of care has always been an important thing to general practice as they are adapting the needs to meet the modern-day patients. So, in today’s healthcare marketplace, most healthcare organizations are focused more on improving the continuity of care to minimize unnecessary procedures, readmission, and transfers. In this article, we discussed briefly continuity of care and its importance for healthcare practices.
What is Continuity Of Care?
The continuity of care is defined as the integration and coordination of clinical data and care across a patient’s particular healthcare providers and related settings/facilities. Patients may endure when medical services care is ineffectively organized. Coordination and joint effort aren’t general; almost no communication across providers may negatively impact patient experiences, related costs, and overall outcomes.
To improve the continuity of care, healthcare organizations need to guarantee that the more extensive consideration group disguises and coordinates their conveyance of care for every individual patient circumstance. As more healthcare providers mean to convey patient-centric care, technological innovation can be utilized to drive better integration, bringing about better coordination and cooperation – and better consideration for the individual patient.
Importance Of Continuity Of Care
Continuity of care incorporates care coordination practices wherein a patient’s re-visitation of customary life after clinic stays/nursing home stays is made smooth through collaboration among doctors and other clinical experts using the exchange of patient health data. It may constitute a timely transfer of medical information, communication with the patient’s family, among other such care coordination practices.
The recent studies in the field of general care provide the evidence to prove the claim that continuity of care is extremely important. Patients under delayed care of the same physician are known to esteem their relationship with their primary care physician more and accept that they have more control over their healthcare.
Continuity of care results in a reduction in time and more sensible utilization of examinations like lab tests by the clinical analysts. Consultations with children, the older and those with constant illnesses benefit immensely from the continuity of care.
RELATED: ROLE OF INTEROPERABILITY IN CARE COORDINATION
How Virtual Care Platform Improves Continuity Of Care
Virtual visits are emerging as one of the most convenient ways to improve care coordination, especially during COVID-19. Virtual care platform offers numerous benefits ranging from reducing travel time and related costs to resolving miscommunication issues amongst healthcare providers.
A virtual care platform can help improve the continuity of care in the following ways:
1. Real-time Communication:
In this heavily data-driven ecosystem, the management and control of patient information will become the core responsibility of the healthcare provider. Real-time healthcare systems ensure real-time information and communication exchange to enable proactive and collaborative patient care. Regardless of the role and facility, various healthcare providers can able to conduct virtual meets to coordinate easily with the care team members. This alleviates the need for providers to travel to other locations to ensure care is well-coordinated at the various transition points.
2. Responsive Concern:
As needed, care team members can escalate critical questions and concerns to appropriate providers and specialists. If an in-person intervention or appointment is needed, a care team member can also arrange for appropriate transportation to the next care setting.
3. Reduced Readmissions:
Medical staff and pharmacists can reinforce core patient education by aligning on how and when to communicate the rationale of a new treatment plan or new care setting. With a virtual visit, patients and individuals can remain easily at home and on target with their advancing treatment plan versus getting back to a clinician’s office or the clinic to have questions replied to and care directed.
Summary
Overall, the continuity of care plays an important role in patient-centric care. In today’s healthcare industry, integrated healthcare can be successfully delivered if all the care team members actively collaborate on behalf of the individual patient.
At CapMinds we offer the best Medical billing and EHR services for healthcare organizations and assist them in giving their patient the highest quality of care, that can be achieved through continuity of care.
