Co-ordinated care for people with complex chronic conditions

Age-related chronic conditions absorb the largest, and growing, share of health care budgets. To address this, strategies of care co-ordination are being developed to promote more cost-effective care through streamlining services. However, there is a lack of knowledge about how best to apply care co-ordination in practice.

Through a UK-based comparison of successful innovative care co-ordination programmes, this project aims to:

• understand the key components of strategies used to deliver care co-ordination effectively
• examine key barriers and facilitators to successful implementation
• develop practical and generalisable lessons for the application of the tools and techniques of care co-ordination
• identify lessons in how care co-ordination can best be supported, in terms of planning, leading, organising, and incentivising
• promote and disseminate the lessons from the research to support the effective adoption of care co-ordination in both the UK and US contexts.

Who is funding the project?

We are grateful to Aetna and the Aetna Foundation for funding this important piece of work.

We will undertake an in-depth examination of approaches to care co-ordination in primary care settings in different parts of the UK. Work will involve:

• an expert panel selecting five case study sites that are currently delivering effective care co-ordination programmes
• a showcase of the sites' care co-ordination work at a public event at The King's Fund
• interviews, focus groups, online questionnaires and observational analysis with the sites to establish key care co-ordination lessons and markers for success. 

The final report on this work will be published in late 2013.

Find out more about the expert panel for the project.