Empowering connected communities of care for medically complex children
If you have a child with a medically complex condition, you know how hard it is. If you don’t, imagine what it’s like to manage three therapist appointments and six doctor’s appointments—sometimes more—in one week. That’s on top of helping your child through daily challenges and managing the rest of your family, your job, and your life—not to mention the emotional anguish of it all.
For parents of children with medically complex conditions, coordinating everything has typically been all the more burdensome because of the siloed nature of healthcare. Meaning that often their child’s medical information would be scattered across multiple healthcare providers who didn’t always communicate with each other in a timely fashion.
At Children’s Specialized Hospital, the largest pediatric rehabilitation health system in the United States, we treat children with medically complex conditions such as brain and spinal cord injury, premature birth, autism, developmental delays, and life-changing illnesses. To help make the silos in healthcare disappear and enable a connected community of care for our patients and their families, we use Care Navigator from BluePrint Healthcare IT.
The award-winning Care Navigator is a Microsoft Dynamics CRM–based and mobile-enabled healthcare technology platform that empowers the entire care team—including health professionals, patients, and families—to communicate and coordinate in real time.
Healthcare has typically been doctor-driven. Now there’s a push for it to be patient-centered. And I’d take that a step further to say it needs to be not only centered on patients and their families, but driven by patients and their families.
Care Navigator helps enable that. For example, a mother who’s the primary caregiver and advocate for the patient can invite other people to join the connected community for her child. She can add a teacher to the circle. That way the teacher can be part of the team and have context to better address the child’s needs at school and be on the lookout for any issues. Or, if mom can’t make some appointments, she can add another family member to the connected community, so that the family member can go into appointments fully informed about the patient.
These are just a few examples of how Care Navigator is enabling better care communication and coordination. Family engagement and connected care are vital to better patient outcomes. And better outcomes are crucial to reining in healthcare costs. Five percent of children in the US have a medically complex condition. And that 5 percent account for the majority of pediatric healthcare costs. So by using Care Navigator to help connect communities of care, we aim to not only improve the quality of life for our patients and their families, but also help reduce medical expenses.
To meet some of our inspiring patients, family members, and staff, please check out our Fight Face video.
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