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Disease management is a structure that is designed to improve a person’s health with coordinated interventions, measurements of health care, where self-care efforts can be implemented. Disease management empowers an individual, who is working with the health care provider to manage and prevent his/her disease.
It is designed to help an individual improve their health with any chronic condition and to reduce the costs associated with avoidable complications, like an emergency room visit and hospitalizations.
Disease management includes the following actions:
Identifying patients’ affected by the disease
Determining the most effective ways to treat the disease
It is more like population-based-care or continuous health care improvement. If properly designed, it works on prevention of complications as well as treatment of chronic conditions.
Conditions most commonly chosen for disease management are Asthma, cardiovascular diseases, Coronary artery disease, Congestive heart failure, Angina, Lipid irregularity, Depressive disorders, Diabetes and much more.
What are its benefits?
It improves your health and lets you enjoy a good life. It comes with reduced spending on healthcare costs.
It is created with the complete understanding of the natural course of a disease and the critical areas where more focus is required to reduce the chances of morbidity and mortality.
How can we design an effective disease management program?
Diseases Management is a process of reducing healthcare costs and/or improving the quality of life for individuals by preventing/minimizing the effects of a disease usually a chronic minimizing the effects of a disease, usually a chronic condition, through integrative care.
Diseases Management involves consists of two streams
• Managing clinical activities
• Interventions for financial outcomes
The Drivers of a Disease management program and their roles in that program:
Program administrators
They are the people who help in the running of a plan and provide useful information on goals, expectations, organizational structure, and incentive programs to the disease management program.
Physicians
The practicing physician’s clinical experience and continuing medical education play a big role, but the system develops every day with significant variation in treating each disease.
Medical specialists must collaborate in developing treatment guidelines, or recommendations from experts should be taken into consideration. Once guidelines are prepared, it can be spread through training programs.
Pharmacists
They participate in formulary decisions, drug treatment protocols, and critical pathway design. Most of these activities involve education and monitoring, for which pharmacists are particularly well trained.
Information managers
Information managers analyze data which helps in designing and operating disease management program. Analyzed data consist of baseline measures which are necessary for comparison later on whether health has been improved and costs are in control.
Information managers help the planning team decide on data formats and determine the importance of current information systems.
Finance managers
The disease management team’s finance experts analyze current costs of health care, and also the cost of the failure to achieve the goal.
Patients
Patient education and intervention of the disease is essential and so is his participation in the management plan. It is very important to measure the progress initially and at the end of the program. In this patient is also made aware of the all pros and cons of the disease so he is mentally prepared. Patient has a profound effect on their clinical outcome and should take their responsibility seriously.
Pharmaceutical companies
Pharmaceutical companies contribute to determining the total cost of an untreated illness and also the natural history of a disease and expenditure on treatment, providing their products on subsidized rate. It also studies other drug using patterns for education programs.
This write-up covers all the basic information about the program and would help you understand the working of it. It is a very effective way of treating diseases, avoiding all the emergency and keeping a person’s disease in control which eventually saves your pocket. However, there’s no claim made about the success of this program, neither about any failure. It is a relatively new program which needs much more recognition.
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