This Glossary is about Population and Personalised Care the latter being a style of clinical and general management which always considers the patients’ perspective as the most important and is committed to increasing patient Engagement, Empowerment or Involvement, which may be regarded as synonyms. Personalised care is an element of patient centred care and is the other side of the coin from population care. This is a diffuse and fast moving field with language evolving at a rapid rate. Here are the key terms and concepts.
- Value – “What is gained relative to what we give up – the benefit relative to the cost but not only to the direct cost, which is the efficiency of a service, but the Opportunity Cost, or the Opportunity Lost to put it another way and there are three dimensions to value in healthcare
- o Allocative value, determined by how the assets are distributed to different sub groups in the population
- o Technical value, determined by how well resources are used for all the people in need in the population
- o Personalised value, determined by how well the decisions relate to the values of each individual
Waste is any activity in a process that consumes resources without adding value for the patient
Cost effectiveness
The relationship between the cost of an intervention and its impact.
Optimality;
Optimality is reached when resources or productivity create maximal benefit with the least harm. Beyond optimality there is overuse.
Programme Budgeting and Marginal Analysis;
The fundamental idea behind programme budgeting is decision making based on explicit criteria related to the wellbeing of the whole population, as opposed to decision making by compromise among various institutional, parochial, or other vested interests. Marginal Analysis consists of starting with a particular mix of services and analyzing changes in that mix. If resources can be shifted to produce greater benefit then this should be done.
Opportunity Cost;
The value of the next best alternative forgone as a result of the decision made.
Equity;
Equity is a subjective judgment of unfairness.
- System – A set of activities with a common set of objectives with an annual report.
- o Network – If a system is a set of activities with a common set of objectives, the network is the set of organizations and individuals that deliver the systems.
- o Pathway – The actual care process of care experienced by each individual patient/client; also described as maps that define best practice.
- o Quality -The degree to which a service meets preset standards of goodness in the delivery of the system’s objectives.
- Culture – “Culture is the shared assumptions of a group that is has learned in coping with external tasks and dealing with internal relationships. Akey cultural issue is the development of a culture of stewardship.
- Population healthcare –the design and delivery of the care with a primary focus on the population in need, not the healthcare institutions, where the populations in need are defined not bureaucratically but by the optimum population size for high value care for individuals and the group in need Population medicine or population clinical practice – a style of practise in which the clinician feels, and is given responsibility for, all of the people in the population in need whether or not they have been referred
- Personalised Care or Personalised Medicine – the tailoring of care to take into account each individual’ s unique needs, preferences and values. The term has become popularised recently to describe clinical decision making in the era of the genome but another term for clinical decision making incorporating genomic information is
- o Stratified Medicine – decision making based on the patients degree of risk, including risk suggested by genomics and based on the long standing practice of risk stratification of elderly people based on social and medical, but not genomic characteristics
- o Precision Medicine – decision making taking into account genomic information either in diagnosis – ‘molecular diagnostics’ –or choice of drug treatment –‘pharmacogenomics’.
- Principal and Agent – legally the patient is the principal, the clinician the agent, even if there is no money involved. Some people feel the shift in the balance of power occurred with the founding of the NHS when the patient was not charged for consulting the GP. The pendulum swung further because of
- o Information Asymmetry – the fact that the clinician has, until the advent of the Internet much more technical knowledge
- o Trust – Faith in another to perform a task that is not in the other’s interest
- o Autonomy – Freedom to make decisions or act without reference to others
- o Informed Consent – Consent to treatment given with full understanding of the magnitude and probabilities of the good and adverse outcomes
- Empathy – In his book on Emotional Intelligence Daniel Goldman identifies three types of empathy – cognitive empathy is the ability to understand what another person is thinking Emotional empathy is the ability to feel what another person is feeling. Empathic concern is the ability to sense what another person needs for you.
- Evidence and Value based decision making – Decision making that ensures the patient is fully informed about the strength of evidence about the probability and magnitude of both risks and benefits of the options being considered and that the patient has been helped to reflect on, clarify and express their preferences based on the value they place on the possible benefit, the possible harm and on the risk they are taking.
- o Health Literacy – The cognitive and social skills which determine the motivation and ability of individuals to gain access to, understand and use information. The term Statistical literacy – the ability to understand and communicate probabilities which is shared by both patients and clinicians, sometimes called risk literacy is increasingly used
- o Framing – the conscious or unconscious presentation of data in ways that influence their interpretation and decision making
- o Shared Decision Making – is a style of decision making in which clinicians and patients are both involved
- o Preference Sensitive Decision Making – is a style of decision making in which the patient’s preferences are explicitly elicited, to avoid
- o Silent Misdiagnosis – namely failure to diagnose accurately the patient’s values and preferences even though their disease has been correctly diagnosed
- o Informed Consent
- o Patient Decision Aids – a tool to support the patient during decision making, particularly before and after the face to face consultation and they are increasingly delivered using digital means variously called eHealth, mHealth, digital health or Telemedicine which may be regarded as synonyms
- Patient defined and reported outcomes are objective measures using validated tools
subjective measures of outcome, including the degree to which the treatment addressed the problem that was bothering the patient most, rather than their diagnosis and the patient’s experience.
Necessary, Appropriate, Inappropriate or Futile Classification of interventions based on the probabilities of benefit and harm
Burden of Treatment – the impact of the process of care on the affected individual and their carers