Campaign for Better Care

Patients and families are suffering because America’s health care system is broken.

It is neither organized nor financed to deal effectively with its greatest challenge: providing high quality, coordinated care to people with multiple health problems. We need meaningful change now.

America’s Families Need Better Care

Good quality health care is important to all of us, but it is especially critical for patients with multiple chronic conditions, especially when those conditions are complicated by physical or cognitive impairment, or when a patient is disadvantaged by virtue of income, race or ethnicity.

Today, people with multiple health problems make the heaviest use of the health care system, at the highest cost, but with the poorest outcomes. While these patients exist in every age group, they are heavily concentrated among older adults. As the nation ages, improving care for this population becomes an even more urgent priority.

The Failure to Coordinate Care Harms Patients

People with multiple health problems are especially vulnerable to avoidable, dangerous and often-costly health problems exacerbated — or even caused — by fragmentation in our health care system. That’s because patients and their families must struggle to get doctors to talk to each other and coordinate their care; take responsibility for ensuring that drugs prescribed by different doctors don’t interact in dangerous ways; and track their own medical information to avoid duplicate tests and procedures. It takes a toll:

• On average, older adults with multiple chronic conditions make 37 visits to 14 different doctors who prescribe 50 separate prescriptions in the course of a year. But that does not mean they get the care they want or need.
• Patients with five or more chronic conditions experience avoidable hospitalizations at 15 times the rate of those with one condition.
• Because their doctors and other providers do not coordinate their care or share information, many patients receive duplicative tests and procedures, different diagnoses from different physicians, and contradictory information on how to manage their conditions. Many do not get better.
• Because there is no “point person” responsible for managing their care, they experience complications from inappropriately prescribed medications, suffer from preventable medical errors, and are frequently hospitalized for conditions that could have been treated outside the hospital. Their lives are put at risk.
• When they are discharged from the hospital, they and their family caregiver often go home without the information, support and follow-up they need. As a result, one in 10 is readmitted to a hospital within 15 days and one in five is back in the hospital within 30 days. They get sicker.
• In too many cases, they and their families are left on their own to find and arrange the non-medical services they need to live at home and stay out of the hospital or nursing home. They feel abandoned and overwhelmed.

About the Campaign for Better Care

Funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies and run by the National Partnership for Women & Families, the Campaign for Better Care will be an unprecedented mobilization to press for the changes that patients with multiple health problems and their families urgently need.

The goals of the Campaign are to:

• Achieve changes in the health care delivery system that result in more affordable, higher quality, better coordinated, and more comprehensive care that meets the needs and preferences of vulnerable older adults;
• Build a lasting and powerful consumer voice that promotes better care for patients with multiple health problems and their families through effective advocacy at the community, state, and national levels.

Join Us

Sign up to be a part of the Campaign for Better Care, or contact Campaign Director Lynn Feinberg at (202) 986-2600 or email us at bettercare@nationalpartnership.org.