Continuing efforts to integrate care can benefit from cross-jurisdictional comparisons

Despite its theoretical appeal, integrated care remains a new frontier for health and social care systems in many countries. A key motivation for increasing the integration of a range of health care services with socialor community-based services is the imperative to improve the patient experience, particularly for individuals with ongoing multiple and complex health care and functional needs. To meet these needs they receive care from many different providers and often they feel they are bouncing around in an uncoordinated system that requires them to repeatedly tell their stories but that fails to provide a clearly articulated coordinated plan of care to help them manage their conditions. A key to improving the patient experience, care coordination and outcomes, is the need to address failures associated with low-fidelity of information sharing among providers, as patients transition from one provider to another. Failure to share information on treatment goals and therapies almost inevitably results in an incoherent treatment plan that often is duplicative or self-defeating and that in some cases causes more harm than good. Along with improving the patient experience, integrated care can increase the system-level efficiency of treatment and lower costs. Bringing multiple services into a coordinated network where information is centrally held and shared supports coordinated scheduling, shared access to essential information and reduction in duplication of diagnostic tests. In theory integrated care can improve patient experience and outcomes while reducing costs.