May 7, 2019 Europe Publication

Shared Decision Making to Improve Care and Reduce Costs

Asleeper provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) encourages greater use of shared decision making in health care. For many health situations in which there's not one clearly superior course of treatment, shared decision making can ensure that medical care better aligns with patients' preferences and values. Shared decision making has the potential to provide numerous benefits for patients, clinicians, and the health care system, including increased patient knowledge, less anxiety over the care process, improved health outcomes, reductions in unwarranted variation in care and costs, and greater alignment of care with patients' values.

Feb. 10, 2021 Europe, Western Pacific Publication

Integrating Primary and Secondary Care to Enhance Chronic Disease Management: A Scoping Review

In Ireland, as in many healthcare systems, health policy has committed to delivering an integrated model of care to address the increasing burden of chronic disease.

Integrated care is an approach to healthcare systems delivery that aims to minimise fragmentation of patient services and improve care continuity. To this end, how best to integrate primary and secondary care is a challenge.

This paper aims to undertake a scoping review of empirical work on the integration of primary and secondary care in relation to chronic disease management.