The National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs recently published a “Blueprint for Complex Care” to develop a collective strategy for promoting evidence-based complex care models. Recognizing that many patient issues have root causes that go beyond the medical, the Blueprint seeks to identify best practices for breaking down silos between the social care delivery system and healthcare.
Perhaps no health system has devoted as many resources to complex care as Kaiser Permanente. Its Care Management Institute, a joint endeavor between the Permanente Medical Groups and Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, has established Complex Needs as one of its national quality initiatives. It has named regional complex care leaders, created common quality measures across regions and established a complex need research arm called CORAL. (Kaiser Permanente has eight Permanente Medical Groups and regions, more than 12.2 million members, more than 22,000 physicians and 216,000 employees.)
In a Jan. 16 webinar presentation, Wendolyn Gozansky, M.D., vice president and chief quality officer, Colorado Permanente Medical Group and national leader for complex needs at the Care Management Institute, described Kaiser Permanente’s efforts and used some personal anecdotes to explain their goals.
She said Kaiser Permanenteis working on the concept of developing core competencies and tools to support a longitiudinal plan of care for patients with complex needs. “These are the folks for whom the usual care is not meeting their needs,” she said. “How do you recognize them and make sure their needs are being met?”
Gozansky gave an example from a patient she had just seen the previous wekend. This women had fallen and broken her hip. She had several chronic conditions, including significant asthma, yet she was not on an inhaled steroid.
“One concept I love from the Blueprint is that this field is about doing whatever it takes to meet the needs of the person in front of you,” she said. In speaking to the woman, she came to understand that singing in a church choir was the most important thing in her life, and the inhaler medication was making her hoarse and unable to sing. She was fairly isolated socially except for church. “My goal was to get her rehabbed and leverage the patient-defined family that is supportive. Her goals are to sing, so we need to do what is possible to get her back to that. We have to capture that information, put it into a long-term plan of care. The goal is not to get her out of rehab but to get her singing in choir.”
The health system has to work on care that is preference-aligned. The woman is not on a steroid inhaler but her care is preference-aligned. How does the health system assure that everyone knows they are doing the right thing?
Gozansky said the beauty of Permanente Medicine is that its setup involves an employed medical group focused on value, not volume. They can interact with health plan partners in delivery of new systems of care. “It is a virtuous cycle about value and person-centered care. This is what our complex needs team is trying to understand.”
She described the journey so far: In 2015 there were pockets of work being done across the eight Kaiser Permanente regions. In 2016 they established complex care as a national qualitiy iniative. “We knew we were not meeting these patients’ needs. We had to figure out the right way to do that.” They also realized that most of the previous research on the topic involved examples that were not in integrated systems such as Kaiser Permanente. “We had to figure it out in an integrated system,” she said.
In 2017 they started working on cross-regional learning — for instance, taking a program from Colorado and trying it in Southern California. Then they sought to align quality measures. In 2018 they got funding to create CORAL, the complex needs research arm.
The Care Management Institute has created a “community of practice” on complex care to break down silos within the organization and bring together research, operational and administrative executives. They also want to work with external stakeholders to make sure what they are developing is scalable, Gozansky said.
Mark Humowiecki, senior director of the National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs, also spoke during the webinar. He said one of the goals of the Blueprint was to get a clearer definition. Some people get confused about terms such as “hotspotting” and complex care, he said. He said there is a recognition that these patients’ needs are crossing traditional silos, so “there is a need to connect care for the individual but also at the system level.”
The goal, he added, is to create a complex care ecosystem by developing in each community system-level connections between social care delivery and healthcare, which in the past have operated too independently. The five principles are that complex care is person-centered, equitable, team-based, cross-sector and data-driven. One of the Blueprint’s recommendations is to enhance and promote integrated cross-sector data infrastructures.
