Recently, I was giving a lecture to a group of doctors when one asked me to define patient complexity. I could not immediately provide a coherent, concise, and clear explanation.
The irony is that RCM Health has spent the last 30 years focused on addressing patient complexity and helping many hundreds of patients with complex problems through its unique process.
Defining Complexity In Healthcare:
In our definition, healthcare complexity relates to patients with multiple conditions (common or rare), which may be related or unrelated, with no clear pattern or pathway and no apparent root cause or obvious solution.
And RCM Health’s Process To Address Complexity:
With these complex patients, there is a requirement for a unique process. Firstly, curiosity has to drive the investigation of every data point that is available. The investigation and analysis must start from an optimistic point of view ( we will figure this out). Then the team must engage in a design process.
The skills of visualisation and scenario building are helpful here. In order to formulate one or more solutions. We tend to invite a team with diverse skill sets and experience to participate in an open collaborative discussion where it is not appropriate to unfairly reject their ideas. . And this entire process has to be repeated until the root cause is defined and hopefully a solution acceptable to the patient is arrived at.
Here’s a Typical Complex Healthcare Case Study:
Frank was 67 years of age. He worked at a door manufacturing company. About 2 years ago, Frank started to develop facial pain which had progressed.
At times, the pain was a 9 out of/10. Frank had seen a number of specialists including: dentistry, oral surgery and neurology. The neurologist believed that this was trigeminal neuralgia. Frank was being treated appropriately with medications for trigeminal neuralgia. But this had not led to any reduction in his pain.
Frank had had an MR angiogram (MRA) which did not show vascular compression of the trigeminal nerve. Frank’s past history was complex with a number of conditions including severe: hypertension, a bicuspid aortic valve, a dilated aortic root, a prior transient ischemic attack (TIA) and a sleep disorder with the bonus of having long-haul COVID.
Now it was up to the team at RCM Health to apply our complexity process to help Frank and his family to identify the root cause and address the problem(s).
To Learn More:
info@rcmhealth.ca
647-350-5500.