Coordinating Care in an Age of Chronic Illness
If the current methods of healthcare delivery remain unchanged, treating chronic diseases will elevate healthcare spending and insurance costs to unforeseen levels. Chronic illness currently accounts for 75 percent of our global healthcare spending and is the leading cause of death and disability. By 2030, two out of three Americans will be living with a chronic condition.
Our current system of healthcare delivery is not organized to treat those with chronic conditions holistically. More efficient and cost-effective healthcare management calls for new approaches to our current model of siloed and fragmented care delivery.
Improving patient self-care, building teams of care providers that are accountable as a team, and introducing tools of technology to better communicate and share information, all guided by clinical leadership that wants to change, are required in order to shift from a siloed, fragmented system to an integrated, cooperative—and sustainable—one.
These changes are more critical now than ever before with the Baby Boomer generation in their senior years now. Unless more attention is paid to keeping people healthy, the entire medical community is going to be overwhelmed with work No matter what ends up happening with healthcare insurance, we are absolutely going to have to figure out that wellness isn’t about medicating symptoms. It’s about promoting health and discovering/treating the causes of symptoms before they turn into chronic conditions.
It will be interesting to see if clinical studies will be performed on more alternative health treatments. Acupuncture has now been conclusively proven to work – but other alternative healing modalities are still being dismissed. Another area that will need to be addressed is environmental/food health. Chronic diseases aren’t just happening because people are living longer. In my opinion, they are also occurring because we aren’t watching out for the health of the ecosystem by keeping pollution under control. This is even more evident in countries that have fewer environmental controls than the U.S. but we’ve all got to work together globally to fix this problem.
Daisy McCarty
http://www.sandiegocubicles.com/blog/