A new care paradigm slashes hospital use and nursing home stays for the elderly and the physically and mentally disabled.

摘要

As a freshly trained internist in the early 1970s, Robert Master saw too many chronically ill and disabled people shuffled from provider to provider. He saw frequent preventable hospitalizations and declines in health, and no attempt to organize the care patients received. "People are treated like pieces of baggage," he says. "The impersonalization and inefficiency is astounding." So, more than thirty years ago, he and his colleagues developed a model and infrastructure to bring high-quality, personalized, round-the-clock care to people with complex medical, social, and behavioral health needs. The goal is to improve health and self-management of chronic illness, using the savings from reduced hospitali-zation and nursing home placements to provide a broad array of individualized services in the home and community.