Can Better Teamwork Save Lives?

Q: What does a care coordination failure look like?

A care coordination failure is anytime there’s a gap in your care. For instance, if you go to the hospital and your hospital visit was not communicated to your doctor, that would be a care coordination failure. Because you really need that continuity from the hospital back to your primary care, so you aren’t readmitted.

You can also think about care coordination between specialist and generalist. If you’re seeing a psychiatrist, are the medications you’re getting from your psychiatrist being communicated back to your primary healthcare clinician? Because the patients that are taking up the most healthcare resources have a lot of chronic conditions simultaneously, coordination among their different providers is really key, both to the patient’s health and to keeping costs down. Coordination failures are associated with overtreatment, undertreatment, hospital readmissions, and also, ultimately, because of the inability to control chronic conditions, fatality.

Source: Can Better Teamwork Save Lives?