We know that to help our patients achieve what’s most important to their wellbeing, we need to bring clinical care and social determinants of health together. But to realize a patient-focused, collaborative and integrated health care system, we must focus on fostering strong relationships with everyone in a patient’s circle of care.

As I mentioned in my first post, collaboration is a key feature of a sustainable, integrated health care system. It’s also at the root of home and community care. Care coordinators are connected throughout the health care system. They work with patients and families, hand-in-hand, to co-create tailored care plans that may involve nursing care, Adult Day Programs, personal support care, occupational or physical therapy, mental health and addictions or other services.

In fact, results from the CCAC’s Community Capacity Plan highlight the importance of care coordinators, patients and caregivers working together at multiple levels. The plan also cites the value of collaboration between multidisciplinary partners, such as health care professionals in acute, primary, long-term care, mental health, addictions and community services.

1. Collaboration Leads to Innovative Programs

Primary Care Advisors

While care coordinators collaborate with patients and caregivers at a clinical level, Primary Care Advisors (PCAs), who are currently unique to the Mississauga Halton LHIN, work as trusted points of contact for primary care physicians and gather feedback to improve patient outcomes and experiences. They also meet regularly one-on-one with primary care providers to keep them informed about LHIN-wide programs, services and initiatives.

Before meeting with PCAs last year for example, many physicians weren’t aware of the support and scope of expertise CCAC palliative nurse practitioners can provide to help them care for their patients and families.

Through the PCA-physician collaboration, which began in 2015, we’ve learned two important lessons:

• We need to effectively coordinate services to address the socioeconomic and cultural (SEC) impacts on patients
• Care conferencing, where multidisciplinary partners meet to discuss how patients’ needs are or can be met, is vital for the success of patients’ care plans

Health Links

Meanwhile, through the province’s Health Links initiative, we’ve seen multidisciplinary partners, including: primary care providers; specialists; care coordinators; other allied health professionals; community service providers; hospital clinicians; social workers; and those working in long-term care homes, engaging with each other to coordinate care for the top five per cent of our province’s patients with the most complex needs.

When it comes to health care, turf and structure don’t matter to patients. Patients don’t care where their care is coming from, or who developed the approach to their care. What matters to them is having maximum opportunity to achieve their health goals. That’s why Health Links, which has seen care coordinators going beyond their traditional roles, has succeeded.

And as this network expands, Health Links can evolve from a program approach to a philosophy of collaborative care where patients receive the level of care coordination they require to support their health. The term “Health Link patient” would then become obsolete, as patients with complex needs will simply receive timely and quality care to match their needs.

2. Collaborative Information Exchange Increases Knowledge

To evolve collaborative, innovative initiatives, health care providers need to share knowledge about the best ways to help patients and families succeed in their care plans.

As Ontario’s CCACs integrate with their corresponding LHINs through the Patients First legislation, one of the most valuable assets they can bring is their capacity to ethically share valuable knowledge and information about their patients. As I outlined in “4 Ways Big Data Informs and Manages Health Care Performance,” accessing patient data from experts across the continuum of care enables us to obtain a complete picture of each patient. We can also use it to learn about the broader population’s needs and identify opportunities to improve each patient’s experience.

As the CCACs and LHINs integrate, I also see a significant opportunity for LHINs to build stronger connections between primary care providers and community resources. Within this new structure, LHINs can become true collaborators, forging connections with various health care providers and creating new knowledge to share across the continuum of care.

To do this, we need to move beyond our walls and not let current management structures constrain our capability to exchange insights that help our patients. My philosophy has always been that structure exists to manage an organization, but to deliver on an organization’s mission and vision, we need to operate in teams across the continuum.

That means we need to share information, which has traditionally been one of the most protected assets in health care. Since their inception, CCACs have been working to integrate information from their Client Health Related Information System (CHRIS) or electronic patient health record system, in as many ways as possible. This integration includes connecting with hospitals and enabling health care partners to document patient updates online in CHRIS records. And as CCACs integrate with the LHINs, CHRIS will become a provincial asset, with information more readily accessible to those in each patient’s circle of care.

But sharing data isn’t enough. We also need to also collaborate on projects and share approaches that work. Ontario is known for its numerous pilot projects. We regularly see exciting new, innovative programs developed throughout the province. Unfortunately, we continuously fail to spread knowledge and increase awareness of approaches that work. We seem to be constantly reinventing the wheel. Why is that? One reason is that as a provider-driven system, individual providers are motivated to deliver innovative solutions that earn recognition, which may lead to increased funding. But our patients and families see the health care system as disjointed, bouncing them from one heath care silo to the next. We have to turn our thinking on its head and see success through our patients’ lens.

3. Working Together to Wrap Care around our Patients

For a long time, hospitals have been the hub of knowledge and care – but as I mentioned in my first post, clinical care alone can’t meet all patient needs. Those patients with complex and chronic needs often require health care services from multiple partners at the community level. The challenge so far is we have not deliberately designed a community care system that meets the needs of aging patients with complex needs. Our system is not set up to connect clinical care with other necessary supports to address socioeconomic issues and ultimately improve patient outcomes.

One way forward is to create “health care hubs.” Health care leaders can use existing assets in certain LHINs to develop these hubs, which would serve as physical spaces within communities that vary between neighbourhoods. These hubs could be attached to primary care practices, seniors’ centres, home and community care clinics, hospital urgent care centres or community health centres.

This holistic approach to care aims to bring the right care to the neighbourhood in which our patients live. In these community hubs, we’d see various health professionals – including care coordinators, geriatricians, professionals from Adult Day Programs and Falls Prevention Programs, neighbourhood-based nurses and personal support workers – working together to closely monitor their patients’ conditions.

Over time, this capacity to collaborate and wrap care around patients in their communities would be virtually everywhere.

As we continue to revamp the health care sector and develop new approaches to care, we have to rely on the experiences of our patients and their family members. To do this well, we need to learn more. We need to engage our patients to uncover invisible insights about their challenges and goals, which I’ll address in a future post.

What do you think? What other ways do you think collaboration can expand health care capacity?