Transcript: Innovations in Health Care Delivery

Kevin Grumbach, MD
Chair, Department of Family and Community Medicine
University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine

We get terrible value right now in the United States for the vast sums we invest in health care. So what we have to do is figure out how to organize care so that money delivers much more effective and efficient health care.

Kara Odom Walker, MD, MPH, MSHS
Assistant Clinical Professor
University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine

I think patients often times go to multiple providers who don’t communicate with one another. They don’t know what the plan of care was from one specialist to the next.

Kevin Grumbach

When you’re a 70-year-old patient who has diabetes and heart failure and arthritis and depression and have lots of problems, the more complex the care the more imperative the need for it to be coordinated and integrated.

Integrated care is about having all the pieces of the health care system work together so that a patient really gets care that’s about the whole person. And that all their needs are met in a coordinated, accessible way.

Kara Odom Walker

All of the people on the team need to work together -- the clerks, the nurses, the medical assistants, the laboratory, the pharmacy -- and if those pieces can work well together, patients experience better care.

What we want to do is incorporate the patient experience into this assessment of what integrated care looks like.

Kevin Grumbach

And then the next step is to create actual questionnaires, informed by the perspective of the patients that we can then more systematically go out, instead of just talking with dozens of patients we can talk to hundreds of patients. And then we can feed those results back to institutions so that they could see, oh, here’s how we have to improve in order to reach a more integrated delivery of care. So, we hope that by contributing some knowledge through our research that this can, in turn, shape how we reform the delivery of care so it is much more responsive to the public’s needs.