Five foundations have joined forces to pursue new approaches to serving patients with complex medical needs.

The Commonwealth Fund, the John A. Hartford Foundation, the Peterson Center on Healthcare, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and The SCAN Foundation engaged the Institute for Healthcare Improvement to identify promising ways of better serving patients with complex medical needs. Many such patients, the foundations believe, have adequate access to medical care yet struggle to find the coordination needed between medical, behavioral, and social services to stay well and avoid costly hospitalizations.

The group’s first public product is The Playbook, which it describes as

…a dynamic website that highlights the challenges facing adults with complex health and social needs and provides direction on how to meet those needs through a variety of resources that detail care models, policies, and more.

The Playbook offers a variety of resources to caregivers, such as an intensive outpatient care program toolkit, a quick reference to promising care models, recommendations for tailoring complex care management for high-need, high-cost patients, and more.

Serving patients with complex medical problems can be especially challenging for private safety-net hospitals because they often have so many such patients.

Find The Playbook here.