As part of the Project on Advanced Care and Health Policy, the Petrie-Flom Center hosted two convenings on Critical Pathways to Improved Care for Serious Illness. Through roundtable discussions and working sessions at these convenings, expert panelists reviewed innovative programs designed for the aging population with chronic illnesses, focusing on those with declining function and complex care needs. These convenings contributed to the development of a framework to guide healthcare providers in developing and scaling programs to deliver high quality care to individuals with serious illness, which is of increased importance given the growth of this population and the development of alternative payment models. The convenings were held in March and June, and the panelists, agendas, slide decks, and related program materials remain available on the Petrie-Flom website (Session 1 & Session 2).
C-TAC, which collaborates with Petrie-Flom on the Project on Advanced Care and Health Policy, now has published a Report, Toward a Serious Illness Program Design and Implementation Framework, to help providers develop, replicate, and scale programs across a variety of serious illness populations and settings. The Report’s Framework provides steps to allow healthcare organizations to assess evidence-based options for each facet of care model design and implementation. As noted in the Report, the Framework is designed to:
- Inform serious illness program development, replication, and scaling;
- Integrate with care model payment design;
- Inform care model and proforma simulator development;
- Inform other aspects of design and development such as policy, standardized measurement, and regulatory analysis.
The Framework incorporates a variety of business models, target populations, and packages of services, and notes the importance of tailoring the program to fit the local context. It also identifies and highlights keys to success, such as leveraging existing resources, recruiting the right program leadership and clinicians, establishing multidisciplinary care teams with strong relationships among team members and with patients and caregivers, and creating processes for evaluation and quality improvement.
The full Report is available here.
Mark Sterling is the Petrie-Flom Senior Fellow on Advanced Care and Health Policy, and also serves as Chief Strategy Officer of C-TAC.
The development of the Serious Illness Program Design and Implementation Framework was funded by the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, with important contributions by project partners Healthsperien and The Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at UC Davis. The Project on Advanced Care and Health Policy is a collaboration between the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC) and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.
