What is Clinical Integration?

Clinical integration is health care providers working together to develop, implement and monitor clinical protocols and organized processes to achieve high quality care in a more efficient manner than can be achieved independently.

What are the benefits of Clinical Integration?

Clinical integration offers the potential to create efficiencies and improve the quality of health care.

Clinical integration provides:

Increased collaboration

Hospital and health care providers learn to operate as a team to better align, or realign, their efforts to improve quality, patient safety, and patient and family satisfaction.

Improved efficiency

Clinical integration eliminates health care waste and redundancy.

Integrated systems

Allows for more monitoring and enforcement tools.

Payer partnerships

As clinical integration improves the quality of patient care and clinical processes and reduces costs, hospitals are able to achieve market differentiation.

Improved care management

Clinical integration allows case managers to better follow their patients' care within and outside organized health systems. As a result, patients benefit from more coordinated care across traditional health settings.

Integrated continuum of care

Infrastructure focused on supporting caregivers and patients to efficiently assess, document, communicate and meet patient needs enables health care systems to achieve this core objective.

Clinical data systems

An integrated analytics system enables access to medical history and critical patient data for all stakeholders. As a result, communication across the continuum of care is increased. This also allows sharing of information that measures service, performance, quality and outcomes on an individual provider and network-wide basis.

Patient-centered communication

Emphasis on timely and clear communication is key to influencing patient behavior, resulting in cost/quality benefit.

Improve health of the community

Emphasis on wellness initiatives by empowering patients with tools, knowledge and practical solutions to participate actively in their care, results in a healthier population.