Care Coordination in the Health Care System

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Care coordination within health care systems ensures the client of an effective and short stay. Care coordination refers to the coordination between and among professional teams that serve valuable roles involved in providing care to clients. Different disciplines of health care professionals include nursing, medicine, case management, pharmacy, nutrition, social work, and allied health professionals, such as speech therapists and physical therapists. They are found in all health care delivery systems and are extremely effective when the focus is strictly on the needs of the client. Interprofessional teams are valuable because each health care professional has specialized knowledge and skills so that health care plans are determined with patients’ best interests in mind. With the communication of ideas amongst the disciplines, their roles consequently complement one another in an age of exponentially growing information. This team process of care coordination can improve quality of care, enhance client satisfaction, and reduce hospital cost by decreasing length of stay; care coordination ensures the best possible outcomes (Koch, 2014, p. 436).
Discharge planning emerged as one of the major focuses of the delivery of health care in the 1980’s. The discharge planning meant to develop treatment plans that ultimately result in the discharge of the client from the facility. The concept is built on care coordination with each discipline involved in providing care included in making a discharge plan. Client education is another essential in which collaboration is an absolute necessity. The health care professionals must understand everyone’s contributions to client education to execute their own plans. Also, information received by fam...

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... a solution to many of the seemingly intractable problems of American health care. Care coordination is valuable because it improves outcomes overall for all disciplines involved in addition to the client.

Works Cited

Camicia, M. (2012). The Value of Nursing Care Coordination: A White Paper of the American Nurses Association. CNPE Health Policy Workgroup website. Retrieved from http://ww
w.nursingworld.org/carecoordinationwhitepaper
Koch, R. (2014). Contemporary Nursing Roles and Career Opportunities. In Lucille Gambardella, Gerry Walker, & Linda Johnson (Eds.), Contemporary nursing issues, trends, and management (pp. 463-464). St. Louis, Missouri: Elsevier Inc.
Social Media’s leading Physican Voice. (2012). Care coordination is key to fixing health care. Retrieved from http:// http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2012/03/care-coordination-key-fixing-health-care.html/

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