Chronic Care Management: What is it?
What is Chronic Care Management?
Chronic Care Managementis care that is given by professionals of medicines to patients, who are primarily suffering from chronic diseases. Chronic diseases are long term diseases that require regular medical treatment and professional attention. It may also hamper one from performing day to day activities without external assistance. These are diseases including but not limited to, mental disorders like depression to lifestyle diseases like diabetes.
What does Chronic Care management do and what is included in chronic care management?
Chronic care management includes a set of important information, including but not limited to:
- The patient’s medical history regarding the chronic condition
- Other information about the patient
- Any medications that the patient is under
- Any specific services that are used to treat the condition
- Information regarding whoever provides healthcare to the patient
The specificity of chronic care management lies in the fact that it goes beyond just some doctor’s visits. It is a consistent relationship-building process so that the patient feels the support and strength and can move to achieve whatever goals that he or she needs to accomplish on a regular basis. This goes as far as saying that the patient can contact the caregiver at any time of the day because the caregiver is a permanent staff for the patient.
What does Chronic Care Management Achieve?
People suffering from chronic diseases cannot experience the best quality life, and chronic care management attempts to change that. Through constant supervision, this process tries to inherently allow patients to have a better life by different means. This does not mean doing everything for the patient. It means that the system trains the patient so that they can reach the maximum step of self-sufficiency, by giving alternate means to perform day to day tasks and so on. There are many challenges in this procedure, but it is a good perspective for patients as this gives them a new outlook on things. As this is generally a recent branch of medicine, there is a lot to discover yet, because the common goals in this system are somewhat similar to other branches of medicine, which is support and strengthen healthcare in general. As the population demographic is prone to change and nuclear families are getting more popular, there is a lot more demand for chronic care management in recent days.