Collaborative Care: The Top 6 Remarkable Benefits For Patients & Providers

As days pass by, the objective of the healthcare continuum is changing to fit and satisfy the needs of patients from the perspective of value-based care. But what is the vital and basic foundation goal of healthcare systems as a whole? No doubts prevail in it. It is ultimately to improve patient outcomes, save money, and minimize the bad branding of mental health.

The integration of mental and physical health is some kind of a benchmark for modern healthcare. For people who rely upon the collaborative care model, there are areas in which vital improvements are evident. Let us now see the remarkable benefits of collaborative care for both patients and providers.

What Is Collaborative Care?

Collaborative Care is a healthcare philosophy and movement that has many names, models, and definitions that often include the provision of mental health, behavioral health, and substance use services in primary care. Similar ideas include 

• Integrated care, 
• Primary Care Behavioral Health, 
• Integrated care systems, and 
• Shared care

To render care to clients, joint forces are needed to improve the life quality of the clients.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) published an overview of many different models and the research that supports them. The key features of Collaborative Care models are:

• Integration of mental health professionals in primary care medical settings
• Close collaboration between mental health and medical/nursing providers
• Focus on treating the person and family.

Collaborative Care Benefits For Patients:

Patients benefit from many things from the collaborative care model of behavioral health.

1. Helps identify before getting worse

Patients hesitate to come forward to get treated for mental health problems. Most of the time people do not know that they are having any at all. Recent studies estimate that only around 60% of patients visit their primary care doctors for addressing mental health problems.

And most physicians are not even qualified to diagnose or treat it. But in a collaborative care plan, a mental health provider will be available to patients from the beginning of the treatment. This early availability helps to reduce unnecessary treatments and ensures that the patients get the truly needed care.

2. Leads to superior pre and post-surgery results

Psychological care for patients with supported physical care pre and post-surgery can reduce their anxiety, complication of surgery, and recovery, as well as minimizes the need for postoperative pain medication – states the American Psychological Association.

These can indeed lead to a faster recovery, allowing patients to gain their full health and start to carry out daily functions quicker.

3. Reduces medical care costs

The cost of medical care sometimes becomes the major barrier to patients from coming out and seeking care. Through collaborative care, the cost of medical care decreased. Studies show a significant reduction in medical costs for Medicaid outpatients who frequently visited their physicians for receiving both physician and mental healthcare.

The care model not only cuts down costs, but also the time spent at a healthcare provider’s office. In this type of providing care across regimens, there will be only improvements in the care provided and care received.

Collaborative Care Benefits For Providers:

Some of the perks of collaborative care enjoyed by providers are,

1. Closes communication gaps

The collaborative care model reduces the communication gaps between facilities or departments. It helps to reduce the loss of vital information of patients for healthcare providers who work independently or at different clinics.

Working collaboratively to render care by all the medical professionals, reduces the communication gaps. Thanks to collaborative care, the personal interaction between providers improves, new collaborative ideas can be found on how to provide better patient treatments and ways to maintain the continuity of care will get opened. These ensure the smooth flow of communication.

2. Promotes patient-centered care

Collaborative care promotes and results in more patient-centered care. The patients shine at the center as all members of a particular care team will be able to concentrate on and contributes to both their joint patients’ care and the overall workload.

Here in this type, the patient gets a personalized team at their side from the beginning instead of getting shuffled to and for throughout the treatment. This creates everlasting effective care.

3. Minimizes readmission rates

Any care method’s common goal should be to reduce further complications, and readmissions, and increase the rate of full recovery of patients. In a collaborative care model, members of a team working together to provide comprehensive care reduces the chances of misdiagnosis significantly.

A patient who is diagnosed properly will be much less prone to readmissions for treatments. The saves valuable time for providers and money for patients.

RELATED: Telebehavioral Health: The New Mantra For 2022

An Overview

Addressing mental health issues demands more intensive and crucial studying. Integrating physical and mental health while providing care leads to better treatments and patient outcomes when compared to providing physical health treatments alone.

Combining both in collaborative care results in better and faster recovery of patients, reduction in medical costs, and improvements in the significant coordinated decision-making process by both providers and patients.

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