Chronic Care and The Medical System
Historically, there has been little coordination across the multiple settings, providers and treatments of chronic illness care. In addition, the treatments for chronic diseases are often complicated, making it difficult for patients to comply with treatment protocols.
Effective medical care usually requires longer visits to the doctor's office than is common in acute care. Moreover, in treating chronic illnesses, the same intervention, whether medical or behavioral, may differ in effectiveness depending on when in the course of the illness the intervention is suggested. Fragmentation of care is a risk for patients with chronic diseases, because frequently multiple chronic diseases coexist. Necessary interventions can require input from multiple specialists that may not usually work together, and to be effective, they require close, careful coordination.
As a consequence, patients with chronic conditions can fare poorly in the current acute-care model of care delivery.
Read more about this topic: Chronic Care Management
Famous quotes containing the words chronic, care, medical and/or system:
“That’s the whole story of my life: frustration. It’s a chronic disease, and it’s incurable.”
—Robert E. Sherwood (1896–1955)
“Have you never wanted to do anything that was dangerous? Where should we be if nobody tried to find out what lies beyond? You never wanted to look beyond the clouds and the stars, or to know what causes the trees to bud, and what changes a darkness into light? But if you talk like that, people call you crazy. Well, if I could discover just one of these things—what eternity is, for example—I wouldn’t care if they did think I was crazy.”
—Garrett Fort (1900–1945)
“Unusual precocity in children, is usually the result of an unhealthy state of the brain; and, in such cases, medical men would now direct, that the wonderful child should be deprived of all books and study, and turned to play or work in the fresh air.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“We recognize caste in dogs because we rank ourselves by the familiar dog system, a ladderlike social arrangement wherein one individual outranks all others, the next outranks all but the first, and so on down the hierarchy. But the cat system is more like a wheel, with a high-ranking cat at the hub and the others arranged around the rim, all reluctantly acknowledging the superiority of the despot but not necessarily measuring themselves against one another.”
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. “Strong and Sensitive Cats,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1994)