IPCHS

This growing repository holds WHO documents, scientific publications, policy documents, implementation reports, presentations and others with information and insights about integrated people-centred health services. Share your publication by clicking “Add publication”.

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March 16, 2016 Global

Coordinating services within and across sectors

Five principles behind the world’s most efficient health systems

Efficiency is said to be one of the main characteristics of sustainable health systems. In this article posted in Nuffield Trust’s Blog some of the key points that drive health systems towards efficiency are described: 1) integrated pharmacy, community and primary care; 2) hospitals as health systems; 3) standardize, simplify through IT, then shift the skill mix; 4) political courage, take social care seriously; 5) a dominant payer deliver a better health, care and value.

In this article, integrated care is mentioned not only as a health care issue, but also as a way of giving social care the ...

Feb. 15, 2016 Global

Engaging and empowering people and communities, Coordinating services within and across sectors

The Patient-Centered Health Record

Electronic Health Records (EHR) have become a core utility in health management in last decades. In this post, Peter Elias discusses how EHR can be changed in order to place people in the center of EHR.

According to Elias, patient-centered EHR would have the following main characteristics:

The basic unit would be one record per patient, and patient would have direct acces to his EHR.
Open source would be a core value in the development of patient-centered EHR.
Patient would have the control of his own EHR, being able to control who can see, change or use the information contained ...

Feb. 2, 2016 Europe

Coordinating services within and across sectors

Integrated care: the importance of ICT in data sharing

In this post by Health IT Central it is analyzed how different experiences regarding people centered and integrated health systems have been developed across the world. Some studies have been able to identify what are the key elements to succeed when performing integrated health care; these factors are rethinking clinical models, achieving a cultural change, enforcing collaborative multidisciplinary working and improving the way patient information is shared. In this post, the author focuses on how important patient information sharing is to make integrated services experiences succeed, being a core factor in continuity of care and becoming a barrier when data ...

Jan. 14, 2016 Americas

Coordinating services within and across sectors

Integrated health systems and cost: accountability and price control are also important.

Integrated Health Services are frequently thought as a tool to decrease healthcare-related costs, specially in systems with a high level of fragmentation. In the US healthcare system reform, Medicare has often been used as a reference point of the overall health expenditure. In this post, this hypothesis is analysed according to a recent article from the National Bureau of Economic Research ("The Price Ain’t Right? Hospital Prices and Health Spending on the Privately Insured") where the authors review the costs of 306 Hospital Referral Regions in the US, showing a big discordance between Medicare costs and overall costs.

In ...