The keynote address for the session on models of care was provided by Dr. Donald Berwick, who emphasized the importance of design principles in model development and the necessity of patient-centeredness in all models intended to improve care. This panel discussion was moderated by Dr. Erminia Guarneri, Medical Director of the Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine, with panelists describing innovative models and necessary components for providing more integrative care, as well as the challenges they have faced.
Patient-centeredness was a key theme throughout this session. Berwick, for example, suggested that true patient-centeredness would attempt to explore patients’ deep feelings about their health goals, so that care decisions would most effectively serve them. Panelists said that the disease-oriented approach of conventional allopathic medicine, described by Guarneri and Dr. Tracy Gaudet, does not establish the type of patient–clinician understanding Berwick and other participants described.
Constructive patient–provider relationships are essential to effectively providing preventive services to individuals with established chronic illnesses, as well as those without, Dr. Edward Wagner noted. He and others suggested that the mindset and principles of primary care may provide a sound foundation for integrative health care. Dr. Arnold Milstein analyzed components of small medical practices, where most physicians work, that are effective in developing teams to manage chronic diseases and control costs. His research emphasized, once again, the effectiveness of establishing relationships with patients and linking them to the care needed to address the behavioral and social elements of health care. This close management and use of established and innovative clinical tools, including web-based tools, are key features of integrative
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3
Models of Care
The keynote address for the session on models of care was provided
by Dr. Donald Berwick, who emphasized the importance of design prin-
ciples in model development and the necessity of patient-centeredness in
all models intended to improve care. This panel discussion was moder-
ated by Dr. Erminia Guarneri, Medical Director of the Scripps Center for
Integrative Medicine, with panelists describing innovative models and
necessary components for providing more integrative care, as well as the
challenges they have faced.
Patient-centeredness was a key theme throughout this session. Ber-
wick, for example, suggested that true patient-centeredness would at-
tempt to explore patients’ deep feelings about their health goals, so that
care decisions would most effectively serve them. Panelists said that the
disease-oriented approach of conventional allopathic medicine, described
by Guarneri and Dr. Tracy Gaudet, does not establish the type of patient–
clinician understanding Berwick and other participants described.
Constructive patient–provider relationships are essential to effec-
tively providing preventive services to individuals with established
chronic illnesses, as well as those without, Dr. Edward Wagner noted. He
and others suggested that the mindset and principles of primary care may
provide a sound foundation for integrative health care. Dr. Arnold Mil-
stein analyzed components of small medical practices, where most phy-
sicians work, that are effective in developing teams to manage chronic
diseases and control costs. His research emphasized, once again, the ef-
fectiveness of establishing relationships with patients and linking them to
the care needed to address the behavioral and social elements of health
care. This close management and use of established and innovative clini-
cal tools, including web-based tools, are key features of integrative
53
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54 INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE AND THE HEALTH OF THE PUBLIC
health practice, as described by Dr. David Katz, Dr. Mike Magee, and
Gaudet. Demonstration studies of new models, especially those that in-
clude mechanisms of payment, could move integrative medicine forward
and help overcome the current reimbursement challenges cited by Mil-
stein, Katz, Gaudet, and Wagner.
MODELS KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Donald Berwick, Institute for Healthcare Improvement
In his remarks, Berwick, who leads the Institute for Healthcare Im-
provement, reflected on the array of earlier presentations and discus-
sions, focusing on the elements of integration that emphasize patient-
centeredness and smooth care transitions. He endorsed the Rorschach
metaphor used earlier by Dr. Harvey Fineberg, saying that the speakers
and audience were using a set of rather vaguely defined terms with great
intention and wonderful spirit. However, he observed, these broad con-
cepts of integrative medicine were being interpreted according to the in-
dividual backgrounds and needs of the participants. To make sense of the
ambiguity around the terms and their usage, Berwick looked for the
common purpose that pulled such diverse participants together, a purpose
on which models of integrative medicine could be designed and built.
Despite the participants’ enthusiastic support for integrative medi-
cine, the simple notion of common purposes could prove to be a weak
foundation for unity. The weakest foundation would be to unite based on
a shared claim to a piece of a limited pie, said Berwick. A quest for
greater reimbursement, for more payment for integrative care and alter-
native forms of care, may unite integrative medicine proponents today,
but would soon divide them, as different groups assert their individual
claims.
Professionals do need to be compensated for their services so that
they can continue to carry out the work they love, he said. However, that
goal is not a sufficient rallying point for building the cohesiveness neces-
sary to advance integrative medicine. This movement must find a deeper
offer to make to society. “Guilds are like mushrooms, and they will grow
very fast before our eyes,” he said. If integrative medicine becomes only
a new list of guilds vying for reimbursement and organizational and pro-
fessional power, “then we are wasting our time.” Our health care system
already has had too much negative experience with fragmentation, sepa-
ration, and combat for a piece of the health care dollar. Thus, the first
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MODELS OF CARE
challenge for integrative care will be for the field to define what is being
integrated, why, and then ultimately to integrate itself.
The Core Value: Patient-Centeredness
For nearly 20 years, committees of the Institute of Medicine have
recommended better system designs in health care. These efforts have
addressed traditional allopathic care, curative care, end-of-life care, and
now the important new arena of integrative health care. This body of
work is exemplified by IOM’s quality of care initiatives that have in-
cluded the Roundtable on Quality in the mid-1990s and the Crossing the
Quality Chasm report in 2001, both of which Berwick participated in.
These efforts also grappled with the question of underlying purpose:
Should anything be better about American health care? If so, what should
that be? The roundtable’s answer emerged as a trio of generalizable
problems: overuse, underuse, and misuse. It also developed a workable
definition of quality: “The degree to which health services for individuals
and populations increase the likelihood of desired health outcomes and
are consistent with current professional knowledge.”
The subsequent Committee on Quality of Health Care in America
then built a framework for quality on the foundation developed by the
roundtable. It went beyond overuse, underuse, and misuse to define a
more ambitious agenda for the health care system. The committee con-
cluded that, in order to achieve a system of excellence, the health system
should have six goals: safety, effectiveness, patient-centeredness, timeli-
ness, efficiency, and equity.
In the committee’s early discussions, the list included patient control,
rather than patient-centeredness. The change represented the tension and
a compromise between those who thought health care should belong to
the patient and those who thought patient decisions should be mediated
by professionals who have knowledge and experience that patients do not
possess. The term patient-centeredness was chosen to imply a partner-
ship that includes dialog and shared control.
The committee also enumerated 10 rules to redesign health care
processes. The third rule, titled “The patient as the source of control,”
says “Patients should be given the necessary information and the oppor-
tunity to exercise the degree of control they choose over health care deci-
sions that affect them. The health system should be able to accommodate
differences in patient preferences and encourage shared decision mak-
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56 INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE AND THE HEALTH OF THE PUBLIC
ing.” This backs away from the idea of patients’ having total control, but
supports the need for them to have the steering wheel in their hands. The
committee’s message was that patient-centeredness is important not only
because it helps achieve better functional outcomes and greater safety,
but that it is, in and of itself, a property of good care.
Other organizations—the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and
Research, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and the Picker Insti-
tute, for example—began to expand the application of patient-centered
care. The Picker Institute proposed that the very definition of quality lies
through the patient’s eyes. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement
asks patients whether they can agree with the statement that their pro-
vider—whether it be physician, practice, or hospital—gives them “ex-
actly the help I want and need, exactly when I want and need it,” which
delegates the very definition of excellence to the experience of the per-
son served.
This is a high standard, but one deemed necessary in almost every
other consumer industry. Modern health care did not begin with a pa-
tient-centered standard. Instead, the field remained rooted in concepts
proposed by Eliot Freidson in the mid-1900s. Freidson theorized that
professions like medicine reserve to themselves the authority to judge the
quality of their own work. Society gives professionals that authority on
the assumption that the profession will be altruistic, has knowledge the
public does not and cannot have, and can regulate itself. Again, this is
not the basis for consumer relationships in most other industries.
Berwick described how the model of patient-centeredness is being
translated into practice in various settings—Mayo Clinic’s emphasis on
“the needs of the patient come first,” or the statement that Boston’s
Parker Hill Hospital set above its door, authored by its CEO, Arthur Ber-
arducci, “Every Patient is the Only Patient,” or creation of the healing
environments envisioned in the Planetree model of care. New work at the
Institute for Healthcare Improvement focuses on three population-based
views of excellence, constituting the so-called “Triple Aim”—judging
the experience of care through the patient’s eyes, addressing the health of
the population served, and considering per capita cost as a measure of
system quality.
Prior to recent decades and in many cultures worldwide, the domi-
nant definition of health was, in essence, the extent to which the body
can heal itself—physically, mentally and spiritually. In this view, the role
of medicine and health care is that of a servant, an assistant to bodily
processes already under way. Its job “is to let [the body] do so, to stand
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MODELS OF CARE
out of the way, and to offer resources or assets to allow [healing] to
move forward,” said Berwick. This conception adds to the significance
of the patient-centeredness concept and begins to suggest what integra-
tive medicine could mean and what its purpose is.
Achieving Integrative Medicine’s Aims
Just as the IOM committee on quality defined a set of design princi-
ples that could realize its vision of quality care, certain design principles
might move the health system toward more integrative care—“the care
that connects technology to souls.” Berwick shared a poignant personal
anecdote that illustrated the ways in which right care needs to draw from
the integration of personal values and priorities with clinical concerns.
Drawing on the day’s discussion, Berwick suggested eight such princi-
ples, summarized in Box 3-1.
The first principle put forward was to put the patient at the center.
Good examples of this are the chronic care model developed by Wagner,
or the Mayo Clinic’s “the needs of the patients come first.”
Second, and related, is individualization. New technology, such as
advances in genomics, makes the individualization of care ever more
possible. Berwick predicted that a science-based, individually focused,
predictive system of health and care could be the death knell for insur-
ance as we know it today. Actuarial prediction of costs becomes impos-
sible when “every patient is the only patient” and care is customized to
the level of the individual.
BOX 3-1
Berwick’s Principles for Integrative Medicine
1. Place the patient at the center.
2. Individualize care.
3. Welcome family and loved ones.
4. Maximize healing influences within care.
5. Maximize healing influences outside care.
6. Rely on sophisticated, disciplined evidence.
7. Use all relevant capacities—waste nothing.
8. Connect helping influences with each other.
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58 INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE AND THE HEALTH OF THE PUBLIC
Third, welcome and embrace the patient’s family, loved ones, and
community. This means not separating a person from the loving commu-
nity that provides energy, self-esteem, solace, and wisdom. In today’s
hospitals, “We create nothing so reliably as we create loneliness,” said
Berwick. New Zealand’s Maori health care system defines health quality
as including physical health, emotional health, spiritual health, and fam-
ily health. Such a definition emphasizes the essential value of connected-
ness.
Fourth, maximize healing influences in health care facilities. In other
words, make current treatment facilities healing places by, for example,
refocusing human interactions and using evidence-based designs that
reduce patient, family, and staff stress; prevent errors and nosocomial
infections; and increase positive influences on health status.
Fifth, maximize healing influences outside the care system. This re-
quires the system and providers to learn about and help patients imple-
ment the many actions they can take in their daily lives to heal
themselves or minimize the impact of illness or disability. The formal
system of care rarely considers these opportunities.
Sixth, rely on sophisticated and disciplined evidence. For an integra-
tive system of care, this may be the most difficult challenge. It requires
forms of evidence and approaches to learning that are far less developed
and far less recognized today than canonical experimental designs and
randomized trials. This is because, in the full expression of patient-
centered, individualized, integrative care, each person is a continuous
experiment of one, and rigorous measurement and evaluation need to be
applied to individual learning cycles, over the long term. This type of
research is not currently embraced by traditional research funders or sci-
entific journals, Berwick noted. While patient-centered research needs to
be every bit as robust and disciplined as current methods, it requires a
forward leap in methodology to learn from the experience of the individ-
ual patient.
Seven, use all relevant capacities. In a sense, the potential health
care workforce is exactly as large as the entire population. The concept
that we have a shortage in primary care is conditioned on a very limited
view of the capacity of almost all human beings, said Berwick. Individ-
ual patients, their families, and even their community can have insights
about the person’s condition that formal care providers cannot.
Finally, the importance of connection. Potential helping influences
must connect with one another. One strategy for this is through health
navigators and health coaches. Another is through interconnected infor-
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MODELS OF CARE
mation systems. However, the fundamental generator of connection be-
gins with an attitude of cooperation among all individuals and institu-
tions involved in a person’s care.
Conclusions
Durable, worthy connections among and across the many individuals
and organizations supporting integrative medicine can be forged by re-
discovering and affirming a common purpose: what we wish to heal.
What we health care professionals wish to heal, Berwick suggested, are
those who come to us for help; ourselves who are among them; a broken,
imbalanced, greedy, technocentric, unself-conscious health care system;
and a world that has displayed infinite cleverness in increasing human
suffering. “The sources of suffering are in separateness,” Berwick said,
“and the remedy is in remembering that we are in this together. Integra-
tion, if it is to thrive, is the name of a duty to contribute what we can to a
troubled and suffering planet.”
PANEL ON MODELS OF CARE
Panel Introduction
Erminia Guarneri, Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine
Panel Moderator
Dr. Erminia Guarneri described how, when she graduated from
medical school in 1988, she thought that she knew everything there was
to know about medicine after reading the essential textbooks of the field.
As a young intern and resident, she was rewarded for applying the find-
it-and-fix-it approach, getting her differential diagnoses right, followed
by appropriate patient treatment and discharge. That was considered a
success, and she was considered a good physician because she could
achieve it. In those terms she again proved successful in the mid-1990s,
this time in the field of coronary stenting. She—and the field—said that
correctly placed and correctly timed stents could wipe out heart disease,
the number one killer of Americans today.
For Guarneri, the wake-up call came when she realized that “a 16-
millimeter stent does not prevent cardiovascular disease.” Nor does
commonly used statin therapy, which only reduces morbidity and mortal-
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60 INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE AND THE HEALTH OF THE PUBLIC
ity by about 30 percent. Further, she was learning from her patients that,
when it comes to cardiovascular health, the illnesses of loneliness, de-
pression, anger, and hostility are every bit as devastating as hypertension
and diabetes. The wake-up call told her that “we need to embrace it
all”—the best of what she had learned in medical school, the best of a
wide array of therapies, and the best of high technology, all blended with
a recognition that the complex human being is made up of body, mind,
emotions, and spirit. “It is a misnomer to think that clinicians can just
treat the physical body and call it medicine,” said Guarneri.
For the past 12 years, Guarneri has been working on a model of care
that embraces the fact that having a positive purpose in life is as impor-
tant as good laboratory values and that our social and physical environ-
ment is as important as having a low LDL reading.
Models That Integrate Continuous Care
Across Caregivers and Settings
Edward Wagner, MacColl Institute for Healthcare Innovation
at Group Health Center for Health Studies
Dr. Edward Wagner raised several particularly challenging issues for
integrative care. Earlier summit discussions highlighted the unsound
state of primary care in the United States. Yet Wagner noted that primary
care has the mindset, the orientation, and the relationship with the popu-
lation that make it a promising foundation for integrative health care.
Since it is not realistic or desirable to expect the development of an en-
tirely separate integrated health care system, it is necessary to update
primary care as it exists today, in order to make it an effective platform
for building integrative care models.
Wagner’s second point related to the false distinction commonly
drawn between preventive care and care for chronic illnesses and condi-
tions. This distinction must be broken down, he said, because the needs
of the healthy population and the needs of the vast majority of those who
have chronic disorders—some 40 to 50 percent of the population—are,
in many cases, the same. Like those without chronic disease, people with
chronic conditions still require prevention efforts for conditions they do
not have. At the same time, prevention of adverse events is also required
for the condition or conditions they do have.
Both groups need effective, evidence-based clinical, behavioral, and
supportive treatments. Fortunately, the health system has made great
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MODELS OF CARE
progress in this arena, and such treatments now exist. Both groups need
meaningful, personalized information, and they need emotional and psy-
chosocial support to help them in their self-care and self-management.
Both groups also need regular assessments tailored to the severity of
their individual risks or health condition, systematic follow-up, and co-
ordination of services across care settings.
Over the past two or three decades, researchers and quality im-
provement professionals have begun to understand the system changes
that assure that these needs are met. Reviews of interventions across a
multitude of conditions and situations show that effective practice
changes are similar, whether in the preventive or in the chronic care
management arena. Such interventions involve greater use of nonphysi-
cian members of integrated, high-functioning practice teams. They also
include planned, organized patient encounters. For prevention services,
encounters may be organized around protocols, such as those developed
for prenatal or well-child care. These protocols, for example, involve
giving parents an active role in managing their children’s health or medi-
cal conditions. Evidence-based protocols, which have been developed
not only for children, can easily be translated into checklists, e-
prescribing, and follow-up steps that assure that the right thing to do is
the default. More intensive management is necessary for people at high
risk, but information technology can facilitate the planning and organiza-
tion of their care, too.
Fulfilling patient needs and achieving system change for prevention
is where primary care comes in. Primary care needs to be transformed
into a more effective foundation for integrative health care, through
wider implementation of the kinds of practice teams and improved pa-
tient encounters described. “The future of our health care system depends
on primary care’s ability to improve the quality and efficiency of its pre-
ventive and chronic illness care,” Wagner said.
Wagner noted that improving efficiency begins with clear policies
about which interventions are of value, which are uncertain yet safe—
and their use, therefore, subject to personal preference—and which are
ineffective or unsafe. Clarity about the performance of various interven-
tions will make the development of high-quality, efficient primary care
easier. Additionally, more time, energy, and perhaps more people on the
primary care team than the current reimbursement system allows are re-
quired for primary care personnel to achieve the ideal of timely, person-
centered, continuous, and coordinated care. Payment reform and infor-
mation technology can help a great deal, but to enable primary care to
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62 INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE AND THE HEALTH OF THE PUBLIC
meet the goals of integrative medicine requires a major transformation
and redesign of primary care practice, he said.
Care Models That Lower Per Capita Spending
and Improve Outcomes
Arnold Milstein, Pacific Group on Health
and Mercer Health & Benefits
The current top national health care policy priority is to reduce near-
term per capita health care spending, or to at least reduce its rate of
growth. According to Milstein this needs to be accomplished in a way
that is clinically responsible, by preserving or, ideally, improving both
patient experience and clinical outcomes. He indicated that much integra-
tive medicine emphasizes upstream care and long-term benefits, which
does not position it well to reduce near-term spending. Milstein explored
the question of whether integrative medicine could play a role in reduc-
ing near-term spending, noting that the national policy priority to reduce
spending is especially important for families in the bottom half of Amer-
ica’s income distribution, who are unable to afford conventional health
insurance, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.
Working with several insurers across the nation, Milstein identified
five physician practices that have successfully used integrative care
methods to achieve positive patient experience ratings, improve clinical
outcomes, and reduce short-term costs by at least 15 percent per patient,
per year—his cutoff point for including a practice in his onsite study.
No large integrated health care delivery systems were able to achieve
this trio of accomplishments. This does not mean that large high-
performing systems do not exist, just that they did not emerge in this
search. (He noted that most observers believe that large systems have the
greatest potential for improvement in all six aims of quality health care
defined by the IOM’s Crossing the Quality Chasm report [IOM, 2001a]).
Milstein theorized that “smaller organizations may be more agile in cut-
ting-edge attempts to break through the price-performance frontier.”
The five successful practice settings Milstein identified were of two
types. The first model was “needs-tailored.” These practices redesigned
their care platform to address shared needs of chronic illness patients.
They were the types of practices that Wagner described during his pres-
entation.
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MODELS OF CARE
The second successful model was a somewhat larger practice, con-
taining about 60 predominantly primary care physicians. This group had
gone one step further and developed multiple distinct care platforms to
address subcategories of need among chronic illness patients. These were
not only disease-specific platforms; some were built to respond to narrow
problems that cut across diagnoses, such as presurgical stabilization.
Leadership for these platforms was provided by hospitalists, but they
were mostly implemented by a nonphysician team that included nutri-
tionists, ambulatory care nurses, and a variety of other health profes-
sions. Hospitalists led the teams because they are the clinicians most
often face to face with the failures of the ambulatory care system.
Both models depended heavily on their health plans’ sharing with
them the savings achieved from their improved care delivery methods.
None of the practices could have survived on current fee-for-service
payments. Almost all of them tried to be globally capitated for as many
of their patients as possible, because their better methods of caring for
high-risk patients are simply financially infeasible with the very brief
encounters allowed under current fee-for-service reimbursement rules.
Milstein thinks of these five practice settings as “medical home
runs.” They achieved positive clinical outcomes and patient experiences,
and they reduced total health care spending. A reengineered care model
allowed them to reduce, cost-effectively, the number of expensive health
crises among their chronic disease patients. Three principal strategies
helped them accomplish this.
First, the practices excel at salient chronic illness caring. Their phy-
sicians and care teams effectively convey to patients that it matters to
them personally that the patient be spared health crises. This has a highly
favorable effect on patient self-management and provides a sense of
hope. Second, they use teams effectively. Third, each practice discerned
that selected specialists in their communities exemplify high-quality,
conservative practice, and they were careful to refer patients only to
these specialists or to other similarly conservative service providers, such
as pain management centers.
In most cases, the successful practices incorporated many features of
integrative health care by routinely assessing psychological, social, and
environmental health risk factors for unstable patients. To enable this, the
practices allowed at least 30 minutes for each clinical encounter, during
which time clinicians thoroughly reviewed the patient’s list of problems.
After this review, instead of “reaching for the doorknob,” as Milstein put
it, providers would ask, “What else is bothering you?” and “What is hap-
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66 INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE AND THE HEALTH OF THE PUBLIC
eases and their symptoms; and tertiary prevention, which reduces the
problems associated with an established disease or injury.
Katz illustrated the center’s work with brief reports of two clinical
cases. He used these examples to demonstrate how integrative, holistic,
team-based approaches can be used to successfully diagnose and treat
patients who had not experienced improved outcomes through the
conventional medical system. Katz noted that holistic practice helps
clinicians find ways to reconcile responsible use of science and respon-
siveness to the needs of patients. These needs continue, even when
evidence runs thin. It should not be necessary to choose between the two.
The aspiration of a more holistic and integrative care system is meritori-
ous and worthy, said Katz. Getting there may not be easy, but “we should
certainly persevere.”
Models That Optimize Health and Healing
Across the Life Span
Tracy Gaudet, Duke Integrative Medicine
Keying off the day’s presentations and the development of innova-
tive models for integrative care in the United States and elsewhere, Gau-
det described a vision for a transformed health care system and how the
models might be achieved within it. The changes needed are not incre-
mental; they require a complete revolution in the mindset that shapes our
current system, said Gaudet.
Chronic conditions account for more than 75 percent of U.S. health
care costs or approximately $1.87 trillion per year. The development and
consequences of chronic conditions are heavily influenced by individu-
als’ lifestyle choices and health behavior. Making a difference in these
trends will require a true health care recovery plan. Increasingly, there is
both a professional and an economic imperative for change.
Gaudet noted that the current health care model does not work be-
cause it starts from the wrong place. It is problem based and disease ori-
ented, and it inadequately addresses the significance of personal health
behavior in maintaining health and preventing disease. Unless health care
professionals can help patients understand their sense of meaning and
purpose and the sources of joy in their life, people do not alter their life-
style choices or modify their health behavior. Nor will behavior changes
be sustainable unless they have deep personal significance, she said.
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MODELS OF CARE
No aspect of the current health care system is actually designed to
address the personal needs of the individual, and this is the fundamental
organizational mindset that must change, according to Gaudet. If clini-
cians understand this concept deeply, they will recognize they must start
their relationship with their patient from an entirely new place. While the
underlying concept is radical, she said, its implementation can be accom-
plished relatively easily within current structures.
Gaudet suggested that four primary strategies would create a new
framework for health. The first strategy is the creation of new standard-
ized tools for clinical use. In the current medical model, physicians have
tools that guide them in taking histories and performing physical exams.
These problem-based tools start with the chief complaint. A new integra-
tive intake tool that asks about and addresses all aspects of a patient’s
health would reorient the patient–physician partnership from the outset.
Instead of a disease-based medical record, clinicians would use a whole-
person medical record that reflects the physical, mental, spiritual, and
relationship-centered life of a patient. Instead of creating a problem list,
they would develop an integrative health risk assessment. Finally, instead
of this resulting in an assessment and plan for the problem, clinicians
would create a health profile and a personalized health plan for the per-
son. Tools like these would help clinicians look at the individual’s health
risk from a holistic perspective and lay out a path for moving toward op-
timal health.
The second strategy Gaudet discussed would be the development of
strong provider teams that are not necessarily centered around a physi-
cian. Important roles and functions are missing from today’s conven-
tional medical teams. One discipline that is critical to this approach to
health is the integrative health coach who would fill a currently unmet
need in the system: a professionally trained provider whose expertise is
in partnering with patients to help them enact the lifestyle changes and
behavior that result in better health.
Third, training in the health care disciplines must be geared to teach-
ing the core competencies needed to deliver this model of health. Reori-
ented educational programs are needed for existing disciplines and
providers, as well as new programs that would prepare new members of
the health care team.
Finally, Gaudet suggested that efforts should be made to disseminate
and implement new models of care that are emerging, for example, from
the Bravewell Clinical Network. The centennial of the last major reform
in medical education and health care is approaching; the “Flexner Re-
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68 INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE AND THE HEALTH OF THE PUBLIC
port” (1910) brought stronger science into medical education, and the
reorganization of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine served as the
demonstration project for that initiative. No matter how insightful and
powerful Flexner’s report was, Gaudet said that if it had not been paired
with a demonstration project, its impact most likely would have been
minimal. The time is now for a new vision for 21st century health care. A
clearly articulated vision, combined with a strong demonstration project,
can catalyze the second revolution in health care.
Models That Promote Primary Care, Medical Homes,
and Patient-Centered Care
Mike Magee, Center for Aging Services Technologies,
American Association of Homes & Services for the Aging
Past work on cross-sector partnerships and the elements that make
them successful may cast light on some of the requirements for moving
forward with integrative medicine. Magee has studied such partnerships
and finds them analogous to the situation confronted by the multiple dis-
ciplines that integrative health care requires.
In the beginning, such partnerships focus on developing a common
language and tools and articulating a common mission and values. These
needs are important preliminary steps to assure sustainability and suc-
cess. However, in the long run, three critical elements determine whether
cross-sector partnerships thrive, said Magee. These elements can be ex-
pressed by how effectively partnerships answer these key questions: Do
you know what you want to build? Is the vision sufficiently powered not
to be overtaken by change? Is there readiness to build out that vision?
Over time, the supporters of integrative health care will need to answer
the questions.
A decades-long supporter of relationship-based health care, Magee
agrees with the values embedded in the current medical home concept
endorsed by various medical and osteopathic professional organizations.
It emphasizes comprehensive partnerships, mutual decision-making
teams, holistic coordination, facilitated technology, quality, safety, evi-
dence, access, and personal relationships. These are worthy attributes, he
said, but the medical home concept may be significantly underpowered
to manage the nation’s future health needs. His concerns begin at the
starting point for care and can be summarized in six words: “Too much
medical, not enough home.”
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A home-centered health care model would focus on helping people
achieve their full human potential. This model requires looking at the
many forces and individuals that influence health-related decisions day
by day, month after month. For a young child, the view may extend out
over a 100-year horizon. Magee said that it requires planning ahead, con-
sidering a person’s uniqueness, socially and scientifically. It requires
“being where the person lives,” in the home.
In this context, home means both a geographic and a virtual place. It
is where one feels safe and secure, supported and loved, awash in social
capital. While the geographic home may change location, the state of
feeling at home should ideally follow. “So much has changed all around
us that perhaps we could be excused for having overlooked the home as a
logical destination and cornerstone for the health system,” said Magee.
Misreading the significance of trends has compounded the problem.
Magee noted three examples of trends that affect home and family
that health care systems should address: how longevity has made families
more complex, as they have moved from involving three generations to
four- and five-generations; how the Internet, which can push massive
amounts of information at high rates of speed, is essentially geography
free and offers almost infinite opportunities for connection; and how
three decades of consumer health information has led to empowerment
that has suppressed medical paternalism and encouraged teams and mu-
tual decision making.
This last trend is now giving way to health activism, led primarily by
informal family caregivers. Magee said that most of these are middle-
aged women, often managing frailty in the older generation and imma-
turity in the younger. Caregivers labor as both providers and consumers,
yet are not generally recognized as part of the health care team. For
them, it is not the lack of information that is literally killing them, it is
the lack of a system.
A sufficiently powered vision of a home-centered health care model
must make complexity, connectivity, and consumerism an advantage.
However, our health care system continues to focus on the loop from the
doctor’s office to the hospital and back again as shown in Figure 3-1.
The home, if considered at all, is an afterthought. A person with a health
concern must find a way into the loop.
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70 INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE AND THE HEALTH OF THE PUBLIC
Hospital
Home
Physician’s office
FIGURE 3-1 Doctor–hospital loop.
Magee suggested a new health care system where the home is at the
center, and the loop begins from home and goes to the care team and
back to the home as shown in Figure 3-2. A rich array of information that
is personalized and customized with vital signs, diagnostics, and plan-
ning milestones could be transmitted automatically and wirelessly from
the home to the care team. In the other direction, data, analysis, advice,
support, and coaching could come into the home continuously. All would
be part of a virtual system committed to efficiency, connectivity, and
mobility, rather than being tied to the bricks and mortar of health care
facilities. Such a vision obviously entails serious challenges, but it builds
on a number of our strengths.
Magee highlighted five examples of strengths that could be built
upon. The first strength is the high value that Americans place on their
homes, where loved ones support and value them. “Americans abhor
homelessness yet have learned to accept healthlessness,” he said.
The second strength is Americans’ increasing support for universal
health care. With this right must come responsibility, he said. Readiness
to define roles and responsibilities in individuals, families, and commu-
nities in return for universal care could provide multiple societal benefits.
Third, health care providers are beginning to accept information
technology. The next step will be to take full advantage of its capacity to
humanize, plan, connect, and bring order and sense to a segmented and
broken system. Helpful resources for expanding this capacity might be
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MODELS OF CARE
Vitals
Blood results
Imaging
Rx Home
Pharmacy
Data Coaching
Hospital
$
Diet changes
Insurance
Alter meds
Exercise routine Specialist
FIGURE 3-2 Home-centered care team loop.
found by partnering with sectors that have tremendous information tech-
nology expertise and an existing position in the home but which are cur-
rently locked out of health care, like the financial, home technology, and
home entertainment sectors.
Fourth, many people are beginning to appreciate that, rather than
creating a socioeconomic digital divide, information technology may do
just the opposite. Connectivity can be targeted first at those who need it
most, whether that is an 18-year-old pregnant, single mother of two in
West Philadelphia; a Montana farm family 200 miles from the nearest
hospital; or the only daughter of a widowed mother living three states
away.
Finally, embracing these trends may allow more efficient and effec-
tive management of the existing chronic disease burden while simultane-
ously building a truly preventive system that will serve generations to
come.
The missing connection at this point is a software application, which
Magee predicts will be ubiquitous on all new computers within 5 years.
This application should be called a “lifespan planning record (LPR)”.
LPRs will supplant personal health records and will come from the con-
sumer side—with or without the support of clinicians. LPRs could be the
tipping point enabling a truly preventive health care system. They will be
a graphically pleasing, highly-powered application capable of automati-
cally extracting and compiling a wide range of individual, family, com-
munity, environmental, and scientific data, then converting that data into
a personalized, predictive, preventive, and participatory strategic health
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72 INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE AND THE HEALTH OF THE PUBLIC
plan. LPRs will accept real-time modifications and provide information
and support for plan adherence. With what we currently know, the 100-
year plan for today’s child could already be imbedded with thousands of
targeted inputs, he said, and 10 years from now, that plan could include
hundreds of thousands of data points.
In short, Magee said that the medical home movement’s values are
not wrong, but its destination is, and that must change. Preserving rela-
tionship-based health care requires embracing current trends and leading
with a vision sufficiently powerful to excite the imagination. This vision
must embrace complexity, connectivity, and consumerism, while rein-
forcing the social health capital imbedded in relationships between peo-
ple and the people who are taking care of them.
Panel Discussion
Following the panel presentations, the audience submitted questions
for further panel discussion, which was moderated by Guarneri.
Reimbursement
The first question asked about the reasons that many young physi-
cians choose to go into specialty care. These reasons are not all financial
and include perceptions about intellectual challenges and professional
respect. Ed Wagner responded that nonfinancial disincentives are power-
ful, but that the lack of respect is largely evident by the way primary care
physicians are paid. He said that the most important way to overcome the
payment problem would be to stop reimbursing primary care physicians
using the fee-for-service payment model. Fee-for-service has a variety of
disincentives to providing the kind of personalized, integrated care dis-
cussed at the summit. These disincentives are not just the levels of reim-
bursement, but the emphasis that the fee-for-service system places on
throughput and brief interactions. “If we can do any one thing in health
care reform, I would say get primary care on capitation as quickly as
possible,” Wagner said.
Noting that reimbursement ran through much of the dialogue, Katz
said, “We have not so much an evidence-based system of health care as a
reimbursement-based system of health care.” For example, the reim-
bursement system makes it difficult to provide team care. If every patient
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sees not just one high-cost clinician but several simultaneously, the costs
are prohibitive. Demonstration research programs are needed to test the
effectiveness of team-based practice, said Katz.
A program designed by Dean Ornish, in which Guarneri participated
many years ago, showed that every dollar spent on care for very sick car-
diac patients could save $6.66 on angioplasty and bypass surgery. Thus
there are precedents for demonstration models and clinical networks that
can deliver effective preventive care. We should test these concepts and
take them out of the realm of integrative medicine, she suggested, saying,
“Let’s just make it medicine.”
Genomics and Epigenomics
Another participant asked about the role that emerging concepts
within systems biology that relate to genomics, proteonomics, and me-
tabolomics will play in integrative medicine in the future.
Certainly, Guarneri said, we will have people rushing to websites
like 23andMe and Navigenics to have a look at their genomes. They will
obtain the information, but they may not realize that genetic risk does not
mean they will manifest a particular disease. Their genetic blueprint can
be influenced by their environment through epigenetic processes. Inte-
grative medicine includes attention to the environment, where and how
people live, with whom they live, and their lifestyle—what they eat and
how they exercise, for example. Understanding these factors, as well as
the biologic ones, is essential to unfolding the potential for illness. After
all, “we are more than our genes,” she said.
Katz added, “As we pursue the trees represented by our genetic
polymorphisms, we ought not lose sight of the forest.” The overwhelm-
ing contribution of personal behavior to morbidity and mortality has been
well elucidated for nearly 20 years. Health care providers should focus at
least as much on applying the knowledge they already have, he said,
“which does not require the use of electron microscopes or profiling our
individual genomes.” If they did, they could slash heart disease by as
much as 80 percent, diabetes by 90 percent, and cancer by 60 percent or
more. While it will be helpful to know what specific genetic variations
an individual has, there is an enormous wellspring of opportunity already
in place that practitioners should not overlook as they attempt to foresee
future events.
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74 INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE AND THE HEALTH OF THE PUBLIC
Strategically, it may be wise to link integrative health to these tech-
nological advances in a profound way, said Gaudet. She said “We need a
health care system, not a disease care system, if we are going to utilize
the science that we are advancing.” While people may believe high-tech
interventions are at the opposite end of the spectrum from integrative
health, she said, high-tech interventions need to be incorporated into in-
tegrative health care in the same personalized and holistic way as other
services.
PRIORITY ASSESSMENT GROUP REPORT 1
Identifying and Advancing Workable Models of Integrative Care
Themes and Highlights
Dr. Fred Sanfilippo provided the report for the priority assessment
group that reviewed ways to promote models of integrative care. This
summary reflects the priorities discussed and presented by the assess-
ment group to the plenary for its discussion and consideration; these pri-
orities do not represent a consensus or recommendations from the
Summit. This group began with the presumption that its discussion
would focus on models that represented substantial changes, and it dis-
cussed priorities, relevant actors, and short- and long-term progress.
The group’s three most important priorities were that models should
demonstrate value, sustainability, and scalability. In discussing ways to
demonstrate value, the group acknowledged that all models have poten-
tial value of one type or another. Prime indicators of a model’s value are
whether it achieves quality outcomes and is safe; another is reflected in
its costs relative to these outcomes; and another is whether it effectively
engages patients and, in their eyes, provides satisfactory care.
In terms of sustainability, the group noted that models being assessed
must work across populations, be financially viable and self-sustaining,
and self-actualizing or continually improving. To the group, scalability
meant making sure that the models could scale up to large and more
diverse populations, but also scale down to the individual level. The
1
See Chapter 1 for a description of the priority assessment groups. Participants of this
assessment group included Carol Black (moderator), Fred Sanfilippo (rapporteur), Brian
Berman, Lilian Cheung, Mary Hardy, Mark Hyman, Bradly Jacobs, Woodson Merrell,
Chuck Sawyer, Timothy Birdsall, and Lori Knutson.
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MODELS OF CARE
models should work effectively across providers and employers and
across communities and states.
The second question the group addressed related to key actors and
their roles. People who are recipients of health care services were
deemed the most important group of actors. Their roles include becom-
ing more aware of nonmedical factors that affect health and healing, in-
cluding social, economic, environmental and behavioral factors; setting
realistic expectations for their care; and demanding changes and ac-
countability from payers and providers. The second set of key actors
identified is the health care provider group. Their role is to be proactive,
not reactive, and to develop comprehensive, coordinated models of
health care delivery that involve multidisciplinary teams whose member-
ship reflects patient needs. These teams should take into account both
biological and nonbiological contributors to illness, health, and healing.
A third set of key actors comprises facilitators—employers, state and
federal governments, payers, and others whose role is to help drive this
change by demanding value. Another group of actors is found in acade-
mia, where educational programs can foster this broader approach to
health and healing. Such programs should be located in each of the
health care disciplines and professions, and new programs can create
new disciplines that may be needed, such as coaches, navigators, and
others.
The group noted that even within 3 years, it should be possible to
have the evidence to identify some demonstration models that work, as
well as some well-functioning, vertically and horizontally integrated de-
livery systems. It would be important to demonstrate, in this time, suc-
cessful ways to provide financial incentives for developing these models
and rewarding their development. Finally, in 3 years, there should be
good evidence of changes in the educational curricula for existing disci-
plines but also educational programs for new professional categories.
In 10 years, the group said that it should be possible to identify best-
practice models that fulfill the value parameters described earlier. These
models should be supported by reformed financial and reimbursement
systems for health care; this step is necessary for any of the advancement
of integrative medicine in general. By 10 years time, information tech-
nology applications should be in place that can facilitate health care
transactions and provide decision support. Also by 10 years time, and
with the right education, both the public and providers can be expected to
have a much better understanding of the socioeconomic factors in health
and disease and should have begun to address them.
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76 INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE AND THE HEALTH OF THE PUBLIC
The group also identified several major next steps. The first steps are
to create a definition of integrative health care that engenders wide
agreement and then to reach agreement on a standardized set of outcome
measures. Next would be to inventory existing models and identify their
pluses and minuses; to inventory the health provider arrangements that
exist in various models and see how they might fit into a more coherent
model or inform the future; and to inventory data and information sys-
tems to gain a comprehensive view of current best practices and effec-
tiveness around work processes and decision support. Other important
steps the group suggested would be for the Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services to support demonstration projects, the National Insti-
tutes of Health to support clinical effectiveness studies, and the IOM to
hold follow-up summits.
Discussion and Questions
The summit participants’ discussion of the assessment group report
revealed a number of models that could be ripe subjects for demonstra-
tion projects in integrative medicine almost immediately, if funding for
such studies were available. According to Sanfilippo, applications for
such funding might come from a variety of places, including large em-
ployers and various communities positioned to move ahead fairly
quickly. Some existing projects with potential to participate in a trial that
might not immediately be thought of as integrative care models also were
suggested, such as the life program of the University of Pennsylvania’s
School of Nursing, which is a capitated, independent living program for
elders that involves nurses, doctors, dentists, and occupational and physi-
cal therapists.
Another audience member cautioned against assuming more empow-
erment and health literacy than many people actually have. The partici-
pant noted that any demonstration model would be a helpful advance,
especially if it included facilitators, health care advocates, language in-
terpreters, and information technology specialists who could make care
more accessible to everyone.