Introduction
The new challenges that the healthcare system is facing today can only be addressed with a collaborative effort and by holding all stakeholders responsible for the outcomes. Accountability, advocacy, and collaboration are three fundamental concepts in today’s care management that prescribe health practitioners duties and responsibilities they should take up to aid the progress. The three phenomena are interrelated: reforming the healthcare system is impossible if every single person involved does not hold themselves accountable, advocate for patient’s rights, and contact other institutions to join the cause. This paper will explain the meaning of each concept in detail and discuss why they should be an indispensable part of the care management system.
Accountability
By definition, accountability in health care is a set of policies and guidelines that allow a governing body (government, health authority, healthcare board, or professional association) to mandate healthcare providers or organizations to reach specific goals. This approach implies that organizations must account for their achievements and be ready to report results to the authorities. Adopting accountability can help augment care management in several ways. First, governing bodies provide medical facilities with guidance and clearly outline what needs to be accomplished. For instance, if the goal is to decrease readmission rates, healthcare organizations can start educating patients on self-management. The need to control the outcomes may be a catalyst for a change and replacement of the reactive system – the one that merely responds to a crisis but does not necessarily pay attention to its causes.
The second advantage that accountability presents for care management is a chance to start an open dialogue between stakeholders. As Denis (2014) notes, the relationship between governing bodies and organizations does not have to be hierarchical. It is quite the opposite: unilateral top-down decisions rarely lead to consistent results. An accountability relationship can be based on two-way communication in which both parties discuss their “relative achievement and predefined goals (Denis, 2014)”. During this process, the very definition of goals and objectives can be altered. What is most important is disposing of a disconnect between policy-making bodies and medical facilities.
Advocacy
An open dialogue between governing bodies and health practitioners can result in introducing new, better policies that will heed all the moments dismissed by their predecessors. It can take the form of health advocacy – a key promotion activity that aims at eliminating barriers to medical services and ensuring equity of opportunity. In his article, Sklar (2016) discusses two main types of health advocacy – agency and activism. The first involves advocating for individual patients’ rights and assisting them in locating resources, medications, support groups, and professional consultations. Activism refers to advocacy that targets large groups of people and big-scale problems addressing, which usually requires governing bodies’ interference. Activists try to bring about incremental changes and impact significant social determinants. Both types of health advocacy render the care management system more sustainable. Health practitioners observe trends and tendencies as insiders and can provide relevant data to authorities who cannot always be there to tackle a problem without an initial request. Health advocacy in the form of agency makes each patient valuable and ensures that they can ask for help and be empowered in their decisions.
Collaboration
Collaboration is one way to overcome detachment and to put the expertise of every person or entity on a team to the best use. Morley and Cashell (2017) list the following characteristics of collaboration:
- It involves multiple individuals interacting and working together to meet common goals;
- Includes both social and practical (task-related) inputs;
- It is an active and ongoing partnership built on cooperation, negotiation, trust, respect, and understanding.
Care management can benefit from promoting collaboration in at least two ways. First, when professionals with diverse backgrounds unite their forces, they can analyze a situation from different angles and perspectives. Morley and Cashell (2017) report that collaboration has a positive impact on patient safety in various contexts. The researchers observed a certain reduction in medical error rates when an interprofessional team worked on a case. The second benefit is bringing family and health practitioners together. Relatives know a patient best, can share valuable information with his or her consent, and help with the realization of a treatment plan.
Conclusion
Accountability, advocacy, and collaboration should be the three pillars of the modern care management system. As the world is becoming more global, it is no longer acceptable to let individuals, entities, and institutions involved in health care be disjointed and detached from each other. The first type of relationship that the healthcare system needs is that of accountability between governing bodies and medical organizations. Through an open dialogue, two parties need to establish realistic goals with clear deadlines and work together on meeting them. Communication between entities in the form of health advocacy can lead to positive changes for one patient at a time (agency) or health policies on a larger scale (activism). Lastly, as the medical field is growing interdisciplinary, the most challenging cases require the involvement of an interprofessional team that can use diverse skills and knowledge to come up with a solution.
References
Denis J. L. (2014). Accountability in healthcare organizations and systems. Healthcare policy, 10(SP), 8-11.
Morley, L., & Cashell, A. (2017). Collaboration in health care. Journal of Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences, 48(2), 207-216.
Sklar, D. P. (2016). Why effective health advocacy Is so important today. Academic Medicine, 91(10), 1325-1328.