May 2017 No Images? Click here Health Care Homes to have phased start, 200 selected practices releasedHealth Care Homes services will now have a deferred and phased start this year, under measures released in the 2017 Budget. Twenty practices will begin Health Care Home services on 1 October 2017. These will be announced soon. The other 180 practices will begin on 1 December 2017. To see the list of the 200 selected Health Care Homes practices, go to the successful grant recipients’ section on the Tenders and Grants page. Precedence Healthcare to produce risk stratification toolTo help Health Care Homes target services for people with chronic and complex health conditions, they will all use the same risk stratification tool to identify eligible patients and place them in the appropriate tier. Precedence Healthcare has won the tender to develop and implement the risk stratification tool and will work with CSIRO on both aspects of this project. The risk stratification process will help providers identify patients who are eligible to enrol and to assess those patients’ risk factors, including the likelihood of unplanned hospitalisation. Health care providers will assess the clinical and non-clinical factors that affect their patients’ health. Patients will be asked for their consent to use their health and personal information for these purposes. Further information on patient identification is available on the patient eligibility factsheet . Integrated care champions visit HealthAs Australia embarks on the stage one trial of Health Care Homes, integrated care champions Dr Kirsten Meisinger and Dr Walid Jammal delivered a seminar to Department of Health staff, during a visit in late April. “Patient–centred care has been part of GP training all along, and the really wonderful, really rich practice that many of the GPs do in Australia,” said Dr Meisinger. Dr Meisinger is the incoming Medical Staff President for the Cambridge Health Alliance, a practice based outside Boston, Massachuttsetts, USA. She has done extensive international consulting on the patient-centred medical home model and is a consultant on the Health Care Homes training resources. But as people are living longer, “many of the diseases that we’re trying to care for require a different model of care” to the episodic care model, she said. Patient-centred and team-based care “is challenging because all physicians have been trained to work really [independently]”. “We feel that responsibility very much on our shoulders. One of the beauties of team-based care is that [responsibility] is actually a bit of a burden and you do see alarming rates of physician burn out,” she said. “One of the wonderful parts that team-based care has brought to our practice is that sense that you’re not alone,” she said. The burden of walking with the patient through their journey “is shared among the team, and that is a very empowering structure for the team, for the patient and for the GP”. When the focus moves from the GP to the patient “the GP likes it more, gets home earlier, feels that they have done a better job and staff feel more important and more essential to the care of patients,” she said. Dr Jammal told staff at the seminar that Health Care Homes is an opportunity "to shift the actual focus a little bit away from fee-for-service and really focus on preventative care… using the team". Dr Jammal is a Sydney-based GP and clinical lecturer at the University of Sydney and Western Sydney University. “[The GP] cannot do everything. Yet I am trained to actually do everything. I’m trained to say… nothing is done without me being involved,” Dr Jammal said. With integrated and team-based care, the GP is freed up to change tack and do the “really high-thinking clinical work”. Dr Jammal is also a consultant on the Health Care Homes training resources. New shared care plan factsheetShared care planning is a key element of Health Care Homes. A shared care plan is designed to get patients more involved in their own care. A shared care plan will also improve the coordination of the services patients receive inside and outside the Health Care Home. For more detail on shared care plan requirements, go to the new minimum requirements of shared care plan factsheet. Check our web pages for regular updates |