Moving away from siloed funding for better patient care
The authors of an analysis published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) say that, in order to encourage innovation in healthcare, governments need to move away from siloed funding to funding that encourages collaboration in the integration of care.
The authors of an analysis published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) say that, in order to encourage innovation in healthcare, governments need to move away from siloed funding to funding that encourages collaboration in the integration of care.
“Although we often focus on who pays for healthcare (ie. private versus public), how we fund health care providers also deserves attention,” said Dr Noah Ivers, a family physician at Women's College Hospital and Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, Canada. “To better integrate care, we may need funding to be integrated, and then providers must learn to work together to make the most of that funding.”
The authors said that implementing evidence-based care presents a key challenge for modern healthcare systems and is especially difficult when patients transition from one sector to another. They said that although there are promising pilot programmes for improving the integration of care, these are typically not implemented, which could be due to the fact that current approaches to funding healthcare providers involve many independent siloed budgets. This means that even if a strategy can be implemented in one part of the system to improve patient outcomes, in another part of the system, it may not be possible to find the funds to invest in that strategy.