addressing the needs of people with chronic conditions.5
The current health care system does a much better job of
responding to patients with acute conditions and is poorly
designed to provide ongoing care to people with chronic conditions,
a phenomenon that Wagner et al. at the MacColl Institute for
Healthcare Innovation call the “tyranny of the urgent.”9
Two very distinct methods10 have emerged over the years to
address the management of chronic care: one method used by
third-party payers is often called “disease management” and the
other method ordinarily led by providers emerges from Wagner’s
“Chronic Care Model.”11
Third-party disease management is ordinarily conducted by
disease management vendors or more sophisticated health plans
that focus on identifying chronically ill patients and by communicating
with them frequently to help them self-manage their conditions
and avert more serious problems, which could result in
unnecessary interventions and avoidable hospitalizations.12
The Chronic Care Model, developed in the 1990s by Wagner et
al. at the MacColl Institute for Healthcare Innovation, calls for a
system of care involving:
• Productive interactions between informed, activated patients,
and a prepared practice team;
• Self-management support that empowers patients to take
greater responsibility for their own health;
• Delivery system design that requires clarifying roles and tasks
to ensure the patient gets the care that is determined to be
needed, that all those who take care of a patient have centralized,
up-to-date information about the patient’s status, and that
follow-up is part of standard procedure;
• Decision support tools that assist with ensuring that treatment
decisions are made based on guidelines, which are accessible
and integrated into the day-to-day practice;
• Clinical information systems that track the care of individual
patients as well as populations;