Review: "The Tangle of Coordinated Health Care" – The New York Times
Health care coordination deserves a big ole Southern "bless your heart." Read The New York Times article by Paula Span.
It's a grand intention to create health care coordinators and service representatives to help walk people through the hurdles of our health care delivery system. But these people only serve to make a convoluted process more confusing.
The rules regarding HIPAA and privacy and the increasing burden of litigious documentation means that there is a lot of hesitancy in sharing diagnoses, treatment plans, and having true collaboration between providers. Throw all that into the blender with Medicaid, Medicare, VA, and commercial insurance products with all of their rules, regulations, and greed, and you have our current system.
So how can we streamline all of this?
P.S.Y.C.H. actually provides for social work coordinators who can, essentially, follow their patients/clients for a lifetime if they choose and be a health care proxy for those who need it. P.S.Y.C.H. also promotes a universal health record that everyone can use to help facilitate care. One would also hope that HIPAA could be adjusted to allow for interdisciplinary communications when in the patient's best interests, with the same high consequence for those people who break the rules.
Until then, I'll just keep "bless your heart"-ing the current system until the masses grow tired of it.