The UPMC Center for High-Value Health Care
In this first post for the new Center for High-Value Health Care blog, we comment on the landscape today’s US health systems face and describe how our team collaborates across UPMC’s Learning Community with research, evaluation, and stakeholder engagement activities aimed at addressing key challenges.
The Role of Stakeholders in Informing Research
At UPMC we develop and test innovative ways for improving the quality and value of services provided to our patients and members. We understand the importance of providing integrated care options, and we wanted to learn more about which type of integrated care strategies work best for which members, and under what circumstances.
Integrated Care’s Role in Addressing Health Disparities and Advancing Health Equity
The verdict is in: not everyone in the United States receives the same care from our healthcare system. Sadly, there is a long-standing reality of structural inequality, racism, and bias in healthcare. Because of this, your race, ethnicity, language, age, and where you live can impact your overall health, much like smoking and exercise do.
Managing Multiple Chronic Conditions (MCCs) Is an Urgent Health Challenge for Individuals and Their Loved Ones
Do you or a loved one live with more than one chronic health condition? If you do, you’re certainly not alone. Over half of adults in the U.S. have at least one chronic health condition and over a quarter of American adults are living with two or more.
Barriers to Integrated Care for People Living with Multiple Chronic Conditions (MCCs)
In managing MCCs, it is also important to consider certain obstacles people face that keep them from getting the medical attention that they need; these are called barriers to care.
Overcoming Barriers to Care and the Pandemic’s Silver Lining for Integrated Care
Sometimes, health care providers label patients as “noncompliant” if they do not, for example, use the C-Pap machine to help manage their sleep disorder or check their blood sugar levels routinely to avoid diabetes-related conditions. Unfortunately, providers default to the assumption that the patient is unwilling or uninterested in taking care of themselves.
Learning from Three Integrated Care Strategies: A Care Team’s Perspective
While we learn from research and adopt evidence-based practices into our work, at UPMC, we also pilot innovative health care strategies and collect data on our current programs to see which types of care management strategies provide the best outcomes for our communities—and then we share that information with other health systems.
The Benefits of Using a High-Tech Intervention for Managing Multiple Chronic Conditions
In our previous post Learning from Three Integrated Care Strategies: A Care Team’s Perspective, we discussed the three types of integrated care that the UPMC Health Plan Community Team provided during the Integrated Care Study to allow us to compare the benefits of each type of care management delivery: high-touch, high-tech, and optimal discharge planning.