Disease Management

Disease Management

Disease Management is emerging as one of the most important approaches to healthcare delivery. The force behind disease management is from the healthcare business environment, continued rising healthcare cost, healthcare market consolidation and public demand.

Disease management is a comprehensive integrated approach to care. It is based on the disease normal course and the person as a whole. The key in disease management is to address the disease with maximum effectiveness and efficiency along the continuum of care, health and life. This approach manages the disease in a manner that addresses clinical and nom-clinical interventions essential at obtaining planned outcomes.

In disease management, the emphasis is on prevention and proactive case management. The efforts of disease management focus on providing timely interventions and teaching at the client level. Clients are taught how to become more accountable for their health and how to become skilled users of medical care through self-management and self-decision support systems.

The successful implementation of disease management depends on the commitment, the capability and the strategic direction of the organization. The organization may choose to implement disease management at many levels. Each level has a degree of comprehensiveness, complexity, commitment and demand. Levels of disease management implementation may include:

Episode of Care Management	Health management
Population Management	Life Management
Specific Disease Management	Cross Continuum Care Management

Benefits of Disease Management

Provides for a systematic approach to manage high cost diseases
Provides exacerbation of diseases and use of expensive resources
Improves health outcomes
Reduces cost
Targets intervention on the group that has the greatest chance of affecting healthcare cost
Fits the evolving healthcare system focusing in the measurement of outcomes, prevention, health promotion and cost containment
Provides data to forecast how future high cost cases should be managed

Who should implement disease management?

All healthcare organizations concerned with clinical, quality and cost outcomes:

The payer organizations	The workers compensation organizations
The provider organizations	The pharmaceutical organizations
The managed care organizations	Communities
The employer organization

HCRG Disease Management Consulting Services

Strategy design for the management of high cost cases
Management of high cost cases
Design, implementation and management of disease management system
Develop specific applications for disease management at different levels of the continuum
Formulate Plan to implement disease management
Formulate outcomes measurement system for disease management
Formulate continuums for specific diseases
Develop plans for outcome-based education and behavior modification for specific diseases
Design decision support tool for disease management
Formulate systems to track key data on patient groups, resource consumption and utilization patterns
Identify all critical junctures that result in poor quality of care, high cost and /or lack of patient satisfaction
Formulate strategies to rectify them
Develop outcome based critical pathways for disease management
Develop and implement management of information systems for disease management

HCRG Disease Management Educational Services

HCRG is an approved provider for continuing education. Following is the partial list of our Disease Management educational programs. These programs can be tailored to meet your requirements and can be presented at your facility:

System's approach: Disease Management Process
Key elements of Disease Management System
Disease Management for the Managed Care Organizations
Approach to designing population based disease management
Disease management design for the home health organization
Approach to designing and outcome measurement system for disease management