Diagramming a Strategy for Mobile Integrated Healthcare Practice

Every mission needs a plan—a diagram of “X”s and “O”s that maps out goals and responsibilities. That was the idea behind an abstract, submitted by Eric Beck, DO, NREMT-P, Alan Craig, MScPl, ACP, Jeffrey Beeson, DO, RN, EMT-P, Scott Bourn, PhD, RN, EMT-P, and others, as part of a presentation to the American Public Health Association, at their annual meeting last year in Boston.

The mission is to promote a novel delivery strategy for an interprofessional practice of medicine called mobile integrated healthcare practice (MIHP), with the goal of serving a range of patients with 24/7, needs-based at-home integrated acute care, chronic care and prevention services. The abstract provides a guide that illustrates how healthcare agencies could leverage existing resources in new ways to accomplish this goal of patient-centered care.

According to Bourn,  vice president of clinical practices and research at American Medical Response (AMR), the abstract led to a white paper titled “Mobile Integrated Healthcare Practice: A Healthcare Delivery Strategy to Improve Access, Outcomes, and Value.” The paper was published in the December 9, 2013, issue of Modern Healthcare.

“The white paper and the abstract come from the same collaborative effort to better meet the needs of high-risk patients within the community,” says Bourn. He explains that they both came out of an initial dialogue to help frame broader issues between disparate medical professionals: public health and public safety, hospitals and acute care, as well as colleagues in technology and informatics. “The key is to create partnerships among healthcare professionals who don’t typically talk [to each other] today,” says Bourn.

Both the abstract and the white paper were developed to work on different levels of detail to create a framework for various healthcare professionals and health delivery agencies. The purpose is to help them think about how they might create innovative projects together with existing resources given their community’s unique needs.

The idea is to break down barriers that have previously kept these medical professionals from working together. “MIHP is proposed as a restructuring of care, not a new way to spend additional healthcare money,” the authors note in the white paper. They stress that “this model must remain patient-centered, with an emphasis on ease of access to care, developing new non-traditional portals of entry, continuity of care and transparency. It is through the synergy of these attributes that care can be improved—safer, more timely, and of higher quality and satisfaction.”

They hope that any healthcare organization that is working to make this mission become a reality will use the diagram. 

Teresa McCallion, EMT-B, is the managing editor of Integrated Healthcare Delivery.