Reprinted from:
bit.ly/2ogyMb6 and bit.ly/2odAjP9 CMAJ, online August 27, 2018.
By Linda Carroll
(Reuters Health) - As America’s population ages, experts are exploring how best to keep
older people with multiple chronic illnesses healthy. A new study suggests that
coordination between physicians may be key.
In a reanalysis of 25 earlier studies including 12,579 patients,
researchers found that coordination of care for older adults with multiple
medical conditions resulted in improved health. Patients in the study had
combinations of disorders such as heart failure and obstructive lung disease,
arthritis and depression, diabetes and depression, or diabetes and
cardiovascular disease.
Currently more than 62 percent of older Americans have
multiple chronic conditions, the researchers noted in CMAJ. And many of those
seniors receive care from a variety of specialists who don’t communicate with
one another.
“To address the challenges faced by our rapidly aging
population, we need to focus on a more patient-oriented and holistic strategy
that targets management of patients with common disease combinations, such as
diabetes and depression, rather than treating one disease at a time,” said
study leader Monika Kastner, a health services researcher at the University of
Toronto, Canada, and research chair at North York General Hospital.
Care coordination, Kastner explained in an email, can be
defined as efforts by health care professionals to facilitate and coordinate
appropriate, timely and efficient delivery of health care services for a
patient.
The average age in the studies was 67. One area where
coordination made a big difference was in patients who had a chronic physical
condition along with depression. For example, patients with both depression and
diabetes had improvements in both depressive symptoms and blood sugar levels
when they got coordinated care.
The new article “takes us in the right direction,” said
Michael Wolf, associate vice chair of research in the department of medicine at
Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
Wolf has personal experience with a problem that’s common
when care is fragmented: the possibility that doctors will provide a patient
with overlapping medications.
“My sister at one point was on 24 medications,” he said in a
phone interview. “It wasn’t till she was hospitalized that a surgeon pointed
out that she was taking multiple medications to treat the same thing. They had
been prescribed by different people. When she left the hospital, the number had
been reduced to six or seven.”
Presently, however, there is no template to show health care
providers how to accomplish coordinated care with the system set up the way it
is, Wolf pointed out.
There are a number of reasons why patients rarely get
coordinated care, said Dr. Alicia Arbaje, director of translational care
research in the division of geriatric medicine and gerontology at Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Top on the list is the way practitioners are reimbursed,
Arbaje said by phone. And beyond that, “we haven’t caught up in our training of
physicians to learn how to work with other providers or even as a team,” she
added. “Also, we don’t have a culture of accountability. In the culture we
have, once a patient is out of the hospital, that patient is now someone else’s
responsibility. And the same is true outside the hospital.”
Patients often assume that their doctors are all on the same
page, Arbaje said. “I think some levers could get moved if there was some
outrage from the public,” she added. “People asking why isn’t care done this
way.”