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Moving Ontario Hospitals Into The 21st Century by Jason Sutherland and Erik HellstenFunding Approaches That Integrate Care Can Improve Access, Costs and Quality
Moving Ontario Hospitals Into The 21st Century by Jason Sutherland and Erik HellstenFunding Approaches That Integrate Care Can Improve Access, Costs and Quality
ca
http://umanitoba.ca/outreach/evidencenetwork/archives/12191
Our hospitals, doctors and community providers are badly fragmented. We pay each provider using a different payment model, with no financial incentives for providers to work together. New models of funding healthcare that use shared incentives to motivate communication and safe transitions between providers are needed for todays complex patients. There are now some promising experiments with new integrated payment models that attempt to bridge these gaps in care. In the US, the Obamacare reforms have launched a wave of projects to manage populations of patients. These next generation payment models reward hospitals for their ability to prevent the admission of people with chronic illnesses like diabetes, where a hospital admission is a sure sign of failure. Ontario faces a tough challenge ahead: do they expand traditional hospital-focused per-patient funding to try and reduce stubborn wait lists? Arriving late to this party has a silver lining. Instead of pouring money, time and effort into upgrading our 8-track funding models to cassettes, we can learn from what others have done and skip a generation in payment reform. By introducing per-patient funding approaches that also integrate payments across hospitals, physicians and community care providers, Ontario can begin to tackle the triple challenge of access, cost and quality rather than passing the buck from one healthcare sector to the other. Jason Sutherland is an expert advisor with EvidenceNetwork.ca and Assistant Professor, Centre for Health Services and Policy Research, School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia. His and Eriks C.D. Howe Institute publication, Paying for Hospital Services: A Hard Look at the Options, can be found at www.cdhowe.org.