Centers of excellence in healthcare institutions: what they are and how to assemble them

Centers of excellence have the ability to dramatically enhance the depth and breadth of healthcare services available in communities. Given the numerous mutual benefits afforded by this delivery model, it is hoped that the light shed by this article will help healthcare providers better understand centers of excellence and be more capable and confident in associated development initiatives, affording greater opportunities for themselves and their patient populations. 

A new paradigm on health care accountability to improve the quality of the system: four parameters to achieve individual and collective accountability

Healthcare systems the world over are facing significant financial pressures and growing demands for services. Many nations have therefore set common goal of improving the population´s health, the quality of the outcomes, and the containment of costs. So, these changes in the health care systems´priorities have set the ground for an interdisciplinary approach necessary to assess the activities of health care professionals and, in general, of health care systems. 

Centers of excellence in healthcare institutions: what they are and how to assemble them

Centers of excellence-specialized programs within healthcare institutions which supply exceptionally high concentrations of expertise and related resources centered on particular medical areas and delivered in a comprehensive, interdisciplinary fashion-afford many advantages for healthcare providers and the populations they serve. To achieve full value from centers of excellence, proper assembly is an absolute necessity, but guidance is somewhat limited. This effectively forces healthcare providers to pursue establishment largely via trial-and-error, diminishing opportunities for success. 

Health assessments for health governance—concepts and methodologies

For better supporting science-governance interface, the potential of health assessments appear underrated. The aims of this article is to identify what various types of health assessment have in common; how they differ, which assessments to apply for which purpose; and what needs and options there are for future joint development. 

The Impact of Primary Care Practice Transformation on Cost, Quality, and Utilization

The Impact of Primary Care Practice Transformation on Cost, Quality, and Utilization reviews PCMH results from 45 peer-reviewed reports and additional government and state evaluations. Implementation of the PCMH and high performing primary care differs depending upon the needs and preferences of those delivering, receiving, and paying for related care. 

The sixth annual PCPCC report, authored by the Robert Graham Center of the American Academy of Family Physicians and published with support from the Milbank Memorial Fund, employed broader search terms and more rigorous search criteria that evaluated studies, reports, and evaluations published between November 1, 2015 to February 28 ...

Understanding and Evaluating the Implementation on Integrated Care: A "Three Pipe Problem"

Altought we have come a long way in being able to articulate the key building blocks of integrated care, the interplay between them is so complex and interwined that it seems an impossible challenge to create any simple implementation model. Yet, if integrated care is to advance, we must become better at smoothing over the many obstacles and challenges to implementation that have bedevilled the uptake and roll-out of even the most proven of integrated care interventions.

This is quite the "three-pipe problem" for integrated care since science has yet to make the real breakthrough to address how we might ...

Integrated Diabetes Care: A Multidisciplinary Approach

Integrated care is an approach that seeks to improve the quality of care for people with diabetes by ensuring that services are well coordinated around their needs. Healthcare professionals, people with diabetes and the system must be aligned to support improvement both in the delivery of care and in achieving better outcomes for people with diabetes.

Economic evaluation of integrated new technologies for health and social care: Suggestions for policy makers, users and evaluators

With an ageing population there is a move towards the use of assisted living technologies (ALTs) to provide social care and health care services, and to improve service processes. These technologies are at the forefront of the integration of health and social care. However, economic evaluatios of ALTs, and indeed economic evaluations of any interventions providing both health benefits and benefits beyond health are complex. This paper considers the challenges faced by evaluators and presents a method of economic evaluation for use with interventions where traditional methods may not be suitable for informing funders and decision makers. They propose a ...

Integrated care for patients and populations: Improving outcomes by working together

This report examines:

- The case for integrated care

- What current barriers to integrated care need to be overcome and how

- What the Department of Health can do to provide a supporting framework to enable integrated care to flourish

- Options for a practical and technical support to those implementing integrated care, including approaches to evaluatin its impact 

The report asserts that developing integrated care should assume the same priority over the nect decade as reducing waiting times had during the last. The report makes a constructive contribution to the debate about integrated care and will be of interest to policy-makers, health ...

From vision to action. Making patient-centred care a reality

The NHS have worked with The King´s Fund to translate their themes into outcomes for patients and set out the most important priorities for action to achieve these outcomes. Under each of their five themes: 

- Co-ordinated care

- Patients engaged decisions about their care

- Supported self-management

- Prevention, early diagnosis and intervention

- Emotional, psychological and practical support

they have described the outcomes that they most want to achieve for patients. In order to achieve these outcomes, they hace then selected the service improvements that, if met, will have a major impact on the quality and cost-effectiveness of care.