Health delivery systems and services integration has now been firmly establish by CMS in their most recent and final rule for Conditions of Participation in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

Wellington, FL November 8, 2012 – Health delivery systems and services integration has now been firmly establish by CMS in their most recent and final rule for Conditions of Participation in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. What does it mean? As explained by [ur=http://www.hsmn.com/l]HSMN’s Chief Financial Officer, “essentially, that all eyes are focused on the patient and that services are delivered in a coherent and integrated fashion within the health delivery setting and across all of the health care delivery settings in a system”.

One of the great models in the country for such a delivery system is the Stanford Hospital Cancer Center in Palo Alto, California. In their Oncology setting, all of the diverse disciplines work as one team focused on a patient plan. The surgeons, medical oncologists and radiation oncology clinicians all work around the patient problem and plan’ and is all reflected within the medical record. The problems are identified, the plan drawn and agreed upon and the implementation takes place over a course of months.

Organization have learned that in this setting where health delivery is integrated, the patient tells their clinicians that they sense their entire “being” is realized and respected. The outcomes are quite good and patients are uplifted as they struggle through all of the therapeutics.

As medical centers acquire physician practices, expand ambulatory services and utilize physician extenders, integration is difficult because of the complexity of the services being provided and the difficulty in treating patients with multisystem involvement. HSMN has assisted CEOs and respective Chiefs of the medical and nursing staff in stepping back and looking at the delivery model across their enterprise.
It is vital to engage the medical staff in a dialogue about how health care delivery can be integrated and patient-focused. Clinicians can be territorial as well as entrepreneurial in their approach; when this happens, care tends to be fragmented. The movement to integration has been in the works for a long time. The Affordable Care Act has only reinforced these principles with potential models for sharing revenue based upon performance and outcomes. While this may be the extreme, with many demonstration projects underway, it is clear that the call has come for health delivery entities to begin a new philosophical outlook: integration of service delivery. HSMN is seasoned in aligning organizations to be successful with these new and dynamic changes.