Nearly two years ago, Stanford began an experiment in medical care, a novel way to bring down the extravagant costs of health care while improving people’s health and their experience with the system. If you ask Shelly Reynolds, RN, one of the first patients to benefit, she will tell you it’s been a wild success.
“They hold me accountable for my own health, which is great,” she told me for my recently published Inside Stanford Medicine story. “Physically and emotionally, I’m healthier than I was before.”
And the experiment is costing less, according to initial figures.
The experiment is called Stanford Coordinated Care, a clinic aimed at helping those who consume the lion’s share of health care dollars. These are patients with chronic illnesses, like diabetes or asthma, who often wind up in emergency rooms or in the hospital because their conditions aren’t being well-managed.
The clinic helps them gain control over their health through a personalized approach by a team of caregivers who are available day or night and who give them the tools and support to manage their conditions at home. It focuses on the patients’ goals and what is important to them.
“It’s easy to make a diagnosis of diabetes, but it can be hard for a person to manage day by day,” Ann Lindsay, MD, one of the clinic co-directors, commented. “We help patients in developing a plan. We support it, and we empower them along the way.”
The clinic is the brainchild of Arnold Milstein, MD, a professor of medicine at Stanford and nationally known health care innovator. He developed a model, called the “ambulatory caring ICU,” which was tested successfully in several major pilot sites around the country. He wanted to bring the model to Stanford and recruited the husband-and-wife team of Alan Glaseroff, MD, now a professor of medicine at Stanford, and Lindsay, who had led one of the sites in California's Humboldt County.
The clinic now has more than 200 patients, all employees and their families at Stanford University and Stanford Hospital & Clinics. Glaseroff calculates that among the first 27 patients treated in the first six months of the clinic’s opening in May 2012, it saved about $420,000, a 39 percent decline in costs from the previous six months, when patients were receiving care elsewhere. He said the numbers are still small and that research is under way to determine if the model is effective in reducing costs, improving outcomes and promoting patient satisfaction.
Initial findings show patient satisfaction at 100 percent. Reynolds is a good example: Working with Lindsay, she has developed a plan to effectively manage her asthma and her back pain and keep her out of the emergency room. She no longer feels like “a number” in the health care system and says having support from Lindsay has made all the difference: “For the first time in a long time,” she told me, “I felt that someone was looking out for me, advocating for me. It was such a relief.”
Previously: Focusing on the whole person to treat chronic disease – and cut costs, At-home program aimed at helping patients with chronic illness and Innovative Stanford clinic to support chronic care patients
Photo (modified from original) by bibendum84
