Victor Murray on the Importance of Care Coordination in Treating Individuals With Complex Needs

There are individuals who have a lot of needs and struggle to navigate different systems to get their needs met, and there are systems that don’t necessarily cooperate, partner, and collaborate in effective ways in order to address the needs of that cohort, said Victor Murray, director for care management initiatives at the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers.

Transcript

How can care management initiatives improve care and outcomes for patients with complex health and social needs?

Care coordination I think is key for folks who suffer from various complex medical and social needs, both on a micro-level as well as a macro-level, and working with systems. And so you have individuals who have a lot of needs and struggle just to kind of navigate between these different systems and get their needs met but you also have systems who don’t necessarily cooperate, partner, and collaborate in effective ways in order to address the needs of that cohort. And so I think having care coordination both working with patients as well as on a systems level is important.

Without proper care coordination, what does care look like or what negative outcomes might occur with complex patients?

Again, without that level of care coordination it’s problematic. Obviously, it’s disruptive for people as they try to achieve better health for themselves, but it’s problematic even from a systems perspective as well. And so you have well-meaning individuals within these systems trying to provide high-quality level of services for individuals, but the implementation oftentimes doesn’t necessarily bode well for people. And so you oftentimes have primary care providers who aren’t talking to hospital providers, to specialists, to the pharmacist about how we can really develop more coordinated care across these systems. Data doesn’t necessarily always flow freely. People don’t have access to data, so sometimes individuals are getting multiple scans, multiple x-rays, multiple tests from various sites all well-meaning, but the care is uncoordinated thus is problematic for individuals.