The Vision of Connected Care

Connecting care between departments in an agency, between agencies and between different types of care givers (behavioral health, public health, primary care, social services etc) is designed to improve the quality of care provided to consumers, to reduce the quantity of medical errors (and the costs associated with them) and to improve national defense by more rapidly identifying disease outbreaks.

In addition, Connected Care is designed to achieve another major goal:  bringing the consumer into the care process using consumer portals to provide access to their electronic health records and eventually connecting them to personal health records. 

The genesis of Connected Care at the national level started in 2004 when President Bush outlined his vision of every American having an electronic health record within 10 years and has accelerated as agencies begin to envision the benefits to their clients (listen to what providers are saying).  The figure below provides a real world scenario of how a consumer could use Connected Care:

As consumers move between community mental health centers, county behavioral health agencies, state inpatient psychiatric hospitals, and local public health departments, the goal is to seamlessly transfer clinical data between electronic health records.  Initially this information would contain diagnosis, active medications and reason for referral.  If we can accomplish this, we can dramatically reduce medication errors which cost the country nearly $100 Billion annually.  In future blogs we can discuss each of these areas in more detail.  If you would like to see more information right now visit some of our pre-recorded webinars.