INTEGRATED CARE CAN RELEASE STRESS ON HEALTH SYSTEM

AUSTRALIA’S health care system is consistently regarded as one of the best in the world, and Queensland compares well to the rest of the country on most measures. We are lucky to live here.

Yet all developed countries face a similar challenge with rising health costs and increasing demand.

People now live longer as technology stretches the bounds of what medical conditions can be treated.

Drugs and treatments can now be tailored to the genetic make-up of individuals, and the results can be miraculous.

This is brilliant progress, but extending our life expectancy comes with a price tag. The cost of the drugs and the care required for all of those extra years of living is inevitably higher.

Currently, about 10 per cent of GDP is spent on health, and health costs as a percentage of GDP are rising.

This is clearly unsustainable, unless we all want to pay higher taxes. (No? I thought not). Do we have a stark choice between paying higher taxes or accepting lower standards in health care, to “cut our cloth” to what we can afford?

There are places in the world that have found an alternative approach. It’s called integrated care and is something Gold Coast Health is actively exploring.

Integrated care means care organised by GPs and hospital clinicians to deal with chronic disease in a way that gets better results. By better results I mean better clinical outcomes for patients, and reduced hospital admissions.

Delivering integrated care is complicated. It depends on really good information systems, and close working relationships between GPs and hospital clinicians. It is particularly tricky because flooding the community with services jointly run between GPs and hospitals is not the answer. That would only drive costs up overall.

At the risk of oversimplifying it, our best bet to make integrated care work here will be targeting Gold Coasters with chronic disease, especially those who are at risk of deterioration and subsequent admission to hospital.

At the Gold Coast we have developed something called a Biarri score.

This is basically a number or index which predicts an individual’s likelihood of admission to a hospital in the coming 12 months.

If we have your data, we can tell you whether or not you are likely to be admitted to hospital with remarkable levels of accuracy.

The Biarri is helping us identify which people out of the 600,000 or so who live on the Gold Coast should be targeted to receive community-based health care. The idea is they get better health outcomes and society has less of a bill to foot.

While it’s early days, we’re working to introduce a system of integrated care that could be replicated across the country.

It would be great if we could do something here that the rest of Australia could adopt, something that meant that we won’t have to face the stark choices many countries now grapple with.