Care coordination is a key area in which this presentation demonstrates the value of nurses. One of the nurse’s key responsibilities is ensuring their patients are happy with their care. Care coordination is based on the central tenet of nursing, which puts the patient at the center of all healthcare decisions and activities. Understanding the influence of the ethical decision-making method, the numerous policies governing care coordination, and the dynamics of change management are crucial for nurses involved in care coordination (Savage et al., 2018). Nurses who coordinate care between various community resources serve the job of a change manager. Care coordination encourages patients to make full use of community services, such as educational materials, to cut down on hospitalizations and readmissions.
The involvement of patients and their loved ones is crucial in ensuring that certain health interventions produce the desired results. Families contribute invaluable unpaid caregiving support to the home healthcare process, supplemented by health professionals and related social work service providers. Patients and their loved ones participate by staying apprised of developments and working together to increase adherence to treatment protocols, including dosing (Savage et al., 2018). Therefore, the case manager must work closely with these parties to ensure that the supplied material is properly understood. Although the patient’s competency to conceptualize the provided knowledge will be influenced by the patient’s degree of education and the type of specialty, there is a need for comprehensive engagement with all patients and their families to project positive outcomes.
Using modern technology, nurses and their patients’ families can build trust in the therapeutic process. The widespread availability of internet-enabled mobile devices can revolutionize the dissemination of information on drugs and their proper use, including dosing, adverse effects, and drug substitution protocols. Using existing mobile apps can improve the sharing of validated and controlled information, lowering the hazards associated with researching medical information on the internet, which may not be verified (Savage et al., 2018). It is important to educate the patient and family caregiver briefly on drug education before they are discharged from the hospital or primary care clinic and to establish a communication network crucial for long-term collaboration to improve healthcare outcomes before the patient is discharged.
Acquiring cultural competence is a significant step in improving clinicians’ ability to work with their patients and their families. Clinicians can learn a lot from their patients by taking the time to gain an understanding of the patient’s values and beliefs (Hawley & Morris, 2017). The plan will emphasize collaborative decision-making to aid clinicians in communicating effectively across cultural divides. Healthcare institutions can encourage greater cooperation across disciplines by giving patients more control over their care. This indicates that the standard medical education is insufficient to comprehend cultural norms and values.
Change management strategies that capitalize on the patients’ experiences are essential to providing high-quality care focusing on the individual. Improving the patient experience is a primary goal of change management, and one of the most important aspects of this is developing and implementing a thorough communication plan. Care coordination is a method for improving the delivery of high-quality, patient-centered care by increasing contact between primary care physicians and specialists or between primary care physicians and community service providers (Morley & Cashell, 2017). A review of patients’ experiences, the exchange of instructional materials, and other matters can only be addressed effectively when experts constantly contact patients and their families. Clinician training to acquire up-to-date knowledge about healthcare reforms is vital to change management.
The basic goal of coordinated care planning is to deliver healthcare services centered on the individual patient. Before the rise of care coordination, hospitals, and other healthcare facilities advocated for a uniform treatment method for patients with the same medical conditions. In care coordination, primary care physicians, specialists, and social workers all meet each patient’s unique requirements (Morley & Cashell, 2017). The best way to improve a patient’s experience or satisfaction is to use their protected health information and encourage a shared decision-making process in which their preferences and loved ones are factored in when determining the best course of treatment.
The ethical decision-making approach through care coordination planning has important implications and outcomes. As a rule, patient-centered healthcare aims to boost patient happiness by enhancing the quality of the services provided to them. Hospital-acquired illnesses can be avoided, and a patient’s overall health can be improved by decreasing the time spent in the hospital, which is the working hypothesis here. Maximizing patient pleasure and lowering healthcare expenses by catering to their preferences is another key goal of ethical care. Savage et al. (2018) found that low-income families primarily use clinical and community settings to get healthcare services; as a result, coordination is crucial to ensuring that these patients receive high-quality treatment.
Care coordination can have beneficial and bad effects on several ethical issues related to healthcare provision. The bottom line is that, depending on the circumstances, care coordination can improve or compromise the ethical choices made to improve a patient’s healthcare experience. Regarding ethical considerations, maintaining the privacy of shared information is paramount (Williamson et al., 2017). Patient confidentiality is severely compromised by the need to share PHI to improve patient care quality. This is why it’s important to have rules in place to regulate how smoothly the integration of healthcare workers and healthcare coverage may take place. However, care coordination promotes patients’ independence by encouraging collaborative decision-making. This makes it easier for patients to give informed consent for major healthcare decisions, such as end-of-life care.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is an integral part of the healthcare system in the United States and has far-reaching effects on how services are coordinated for patients. HIPAA uniquely impacts care coordination because it regulates the transmission of patients’ personal health information (PHI) from their primary care physicians, specialists, and insurance companies to other healthcare providers. The privacy rule establishes parameters within which healthcare professionals and insurance companies may exchange information about their patients without first obtaining the patients’ consent (Morley & Cashell, 2017). Additionally, HIPAA restricts the extent to which providers and settings can work together to ensure the authenticity and privacy of patient data.
Since the job of nurses and the motivation for care coordination are linked, nurses play an essential role in this process. Care coordination is thus formed from the perspective of nursing’s duty to promote the patient’s wishes and preferences. Through a focus on a healthcare plan that is oriented toward the preferences of the patients and their families, RNs can play a significant role in improving healthcare efficiency, especially from a cost-savings standpoint. According to Morley & Cashell (2017), the care coordination method provides the most practical foundation for such a position, as it is in the nurses’ best interest to advocate for patients’ rights.
In conclusion, care coordination’s primary goal is to improve patient-centered healthcare by strengthening its central tenet. The focus is on bringing together primary care physicians and specialists to work together in community and clinic settings. High-quality services tailored to each individual’s tastes and cultural background are made possible through information sharing and improved communication. Ethical considerations, including privacy, choice, and value for money, are all affected by care coordination, both positively and negatively. Care coordination is influenced by policy regulations such as HIPAA, which push for integration without patients’ consent and set rules that cap the depth of integration.
References
Hawley, S. T., & Morris, A. M. (2017). Cultural challenges to engaging patients in shared decision making. Patient education and counseling, 100(1), 18-24.
Morley, L., & Cashell, A. (2017). Collaboration in health care. Journal of medical imaging and radiation sciences, 48(2), 207-216.
Savage, J. S., Kling, S. M., Cook, A., Hess, L., Lutcher, S., Marini, M., & Paul, I. M. (2018). A patient-centered, coordinated care approach delivered by community and pediatric primary care providers to promote responsive parenting: pragmatic randomized clinical trial rationale and protocol. BMC pediatrics, 18(1), 1-11
Williamson, A. A., Raglin Bignall, W. J., Swift, L. E., Hung, A. H., Power, T. J., Robins, P. M., & Mautone, J. A. (2017). Ethical and legal issues in integrated care settings: Case examples from pediatric primary care. Clinical Practice in Pediatric Psychology, 5(2), 196.