Governance and performance measurement in integrated care. An Evidence Based Integrated Care Approach

Abstract

Introduction: Healthcare institutions in The Netherlands are faced with the facts of increasing extent of internal and external accountability. This is related to the fact that healthcare institutions and their professionals are obliged to register a full set of indicators which are required input to effect this accountability. This is also known as governance. One of the definitions is: to control and to account for Minderman 2008 or controlling accountability Hoek 2007. On the one side in integrated care, care pathways are characterized by the delivery of care interventions proof of concept and on the other side pathways are characterized by the organization of the delivery of care interventions proof in context. Both concept and context of care are related to governance and performance measurement in healthcare. In general governance in healthcare in The Netherlands focuses on control, accountability and controlling the boards, mostly within one care organisation. However in integrated care governance and performance measurement should ideally be on cooperation and trust between the organizations. Governance therefore includes various forms of accountability, concerning several areas: from government national and local, to organizations and commissioners, to organizations and their supervisory boards, to organizations and their financiers and the patient. Healthcare organisations must be accountable to e.g.: The Dutch Healthcare Inspectorate, The care insurance companies and The National Healthcare Institute. Furthermore, healthcare institutions have to account for their efforts to deliver quality of healthcare. The way this is done is through a system administrating their internal performance indicators. In this respect, one can ask how indicators are administrated within healthcare organisations and how external accountability is designed. Different gaps of governance and accountability can thus be found e.g.: A gap between what accountancy data in care institutions is collected, their network and what is externally justified to the involved parties. The gap between governance and is the ones accountable to people and municipals are involved in decentralization. Gap of citizens and governance. Theory/Methods: A systematic review of literature on what is the current knowledge on governance in integrated care, and an extensive case study which will be conducted in Dutch healthcare organisations and healthcare network organisations. One of the characteristics of case study method is: a narrow domain with several research units, in depth rather than a broad view, the supposed concerns in many cases the entire research area instead of a few variables like in a survey study. Discussion: What should governance as an accountability tool look like within the context of evidence-based integrated care and what knowledge is gained and how can this knowledge be used to meet accountability issues?