Hunter and New England HealthPathways: a 4-year journey of integrated care.

Conclusions HealthPathways is a vehicle for building strong foundations to support system change and integrated care. The critical elements for acceptability, growth and sustainability are the strong relationships between primary care and specialist clinicians, as well as formal partnerships that are built from the processes used to develop HealthPathways.What is known about the topic? HealthPathways and similar web-based evidence-informed guidelines aimed at improving system integration are increasing in Australia. There are few published papers that describe approaches to inform the ongoing implementation of such programs.What does this paper add? This paper describes iterative methodology for evaluating complex programs, such as HealthPathways, that identifies the critical factors required to build sustainable models of integrated care.What are the implications for practitioners? The 4-year experience of Hunter and New England HealthPathways provides an approach to improve the implementation, sustainability and spread of similar programs and associated integrated care initiatives. PMID: 28214475 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Australian Health Review - Category: Hospital Management Authors: Tags: Aust Health Rev Source Type: research