Developing a systems approach to enable patient navigation: A path to achieving patient empowerment?
Mar 23, 2021The CSIRO Future of Health Report cites the importance of patient-centred healthcare but the current state is that the Australian healthcare system is cited both nationally and globally as too complex to navigate. Finding the consumer in the current system is likened to a game of Where’s Wally. In the 1990s, patient activism in HIV/AIDS was a driving force of change and political voice in the sector. The pervading mantra was “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”.
Understanding the current state
The healthcare system can be depicted as a triangle across levels (community, primary, secondary and tertiary care). The general public, live and access services in the bottom and largest level of the triangle. We access ‘close to home care’ in the community through the services of our general practitioners or allied health team. Where needed, we may be referred to secondary care services in hospitals, and for particular needs and specialties, we may be referred to tertiary care.
Often-times we, whether as members of the public or as workers in healthcare, have no real understanding of the linkages between the services let alone all of the services available, the referral mechanisms or timelines or the true cost of such services. It is also hard to know whether the care quality is good, poor or indifferent and what line of recourse we have – if any – if things are not going the way we think they should.
Given how important health is at an individual and population level, there is no comprehensive education on health and the healthcare system. It is not a standard subject in schools although a curriculum does exist for health and wellness. As patients, we simply access what we need, when we need it – until some crisis; a heart attack, strange lump or accident, flings us into the melee of the system, that we find we neither understand it nor does it empower us.
As clinicians and workers in the health system, do we actually ever appreciate its complexity until we find ourselves, friends or loved ones, unwittingly in the middle of it? When we find ourselves in this position, how do we ensure we find our voice? How do we feel like we matter, especially when the staff are so busy? Is optimal care measured by a clinical result, how someone makes you feel – or both? How are these outputs captured, at individual and population levels and who keeps ‘the system’ accountable?
Every day, many Australians come into contact with the health system. On an average day, 830 babies are born and 430 people die; 400 people are diagnosed with cancer, 100 people have a stroke and 1,460 people are hospitalised due to injury. On an average day, 406,000 visit a general practitioner. These numbers represent people and their families across nationalities and sociodemographic groups in urban, rural and remote locations. If the future is personalised care, how do we measure, aggregate and analyse those individual experiences across the levels of healthcare at a population level to understand the true current state?
Bridging the gap: Patient or consumer?
The problem of this complexity is ongoing, with unconnected silos everywhere and the issues of navigation smouldering for decades. Every so often a disruptor happens creating an opportunity to challenge the status quo. The problem is that these happen in silos and do not pervade at a system level.
Over 20 years ago, HIV/AIDS was a disruptor that created a global unity in the community impacted. It was a model of cultural change in collaboration, patient activism and technological advance; but the learnings never scaled to a strategic health-system level. In 2020 however, Covid-19 has been both a disruptor and leveller across silos. A pandemic does not discriminate. Moreover, it has exposed, globally and nationally, fault-lines in health systems and leadership.
Integrating care and interoperability are often quoted terms from healthcare professionals but in thinking about the challenge from the patient point of view, given we cannot easily enact scalable, sustainable strategies such as those proposed by Michael Porter and Elizbeth Olmsted Teisberg in Redefining Health Care, should we now ask if it is time to consider a different solution?
Perhaps one of enabling patients to navigate the complexity of the system? After all, whose health is it anyway? Do we really understand the impact of a diagnosis, if we don’t have lived experience? So how can we anticipate and minimise the barriers in healthcare and enhance the enablers to improve the patient experience across the whole of the healthcare journey? The following from a patient, reflecting on their own experience provides clear insight:
“and it … it literally is your life in their hands. So, you listen and try and take onboard a lot of information that is given your way. Some of which is ambiguous, some of which is contradictory, truly quite an anxiety provoking time in one’s life”.
Developing scalable solutions: Patient and systems navigation
So, if the problem in health is that it is a legacy system no longer fit for purpose, how about the radical thought of someone (or something) that can understand the system and make it work for the person that’s trying to use it? A workaround yes, not ideal, but surely a bridge to the future? We embrace the opportunities that Digital Health in all its guises can provide, though the technology is really not the issue – it is about culture and getting the ‘system’ to use that technology effectively. Many elderly or digitally challenged individuals – both health professionals and patients may have difficulty accessing technology but can be assisted by a ‘navigator’.
Harold Freeman is widely regarded as the father of patient navigation. In Harlem, New York in 1990, Professor Freeman saw that women of certain demographic and socioeconomic groups were having worse health outcomes than other women in being diagnosed and treated for breast cancer. He sought to understand the enablers and barriers of care and set up an approach to address this.
By providing a person, who understands the system and what the outcome should be, the patient is provided a resource in the form of a patient navigator to help negotiate the healthcare journey. From the introduction of the first patient navigator program in cancer care in 1990, public funding was secured through the National Cancer Institute to establish the Patient Navigation Research Program and specific legislation followed in the form of the Patient Navigator and Chronic Diseases Prevention Act.
While the USA have led the way, through public health and private insurance systems, many countries are now looking at how to effectively use system navigation to improve health and care journeys. These include the UK, Canada and more recently Australia. However, in this country, there is no centralised approach. This is evidenced by the increasing number of roles across the sectors of health, not-for-profit and lay communities for cancer care navigators, mental health navigators, aged care navigators and many others. How do we build on the experience both locally and globally of developing exemplars? In the development of navigator training programs, it should be acknowledged that 60% of those over 65 in Australia have more than one chronic disease and therefore generalist navigators, as well as specific roles, should be developed as part of a comprehensive model.
Primary mixed-methods research conducted in Australia in 2020 examined the current state of healthcare navigation in Australia. Patients were interviewed to understand their respective journeys across primary, secondary and tertiary care. In addition, primary health network surveys and interviews in primary and hospital care were conducted. While thematic analysis gave clear insights into the structural, informational and emotional considerations of the healthcare journey it was the experience of the individual interactions and enablers and barriers that were of key importance for the patient. Given the role of the navigator is to remove barriers and enhance the healthcare experience this provides an alternative and timely opportunity to enable and empower patient care as well as system change from the demand side versus the supply side.
A major role for ‘Navigators’ would be in connecting patients with their health providers and also playing a role in identifying some of the social dimensions of their health problems and perhaps broadening the role of social prescribing which is now gaining traction in Australia. The health and social welfare workforce is around 15 % of the Australian workforce and needs to provide the right person with the right skills in the right place at the right time and at the right cost. Covid and such reports as the Royal Commissions into Aged Care and into Mental Health have shown us we do not have that. This is a great opportunity for Governments to act to provide the fit for purpose workforce we need to deliver the health outcomes all Australians deserve.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” (Lao Tzu).
Siân is a UK-trained pharmacist, MBA and GAICD qualified. After a long tenure in global roles in pharma starting in HIV/AIDS in the 1990s, Siân completed the Master of Public Health in 2020 at the University of Melbourne and is keen to bridge past global experience and new knowledge to be a useful contributor and activator to the public health discourse. Siân’s passions are health system strengthening, reform and policy development focused on patient empowerment and patient-centric models of care. Siân is a Board Director at LiverWELL and Deputy Chair of the Precision Health Community of Practice at the Australian Institute of Digital Health.
Peter Brooks trained in medicine as a rheumatologist and has a major interest in health workforce reform in particular new models of care with role substitution and team care. He established the first Physician Assistant program in Australia and more recently was instrumental in the develop of a Health Navigator Program . He has been a major promotor of Digital solutions particularly for chronic disease and established the Centre for On Line Health at UQ in 2000. He is also a strong advocate for patient engagement in all aspects of health decision making and health policy issues including research integrity and use of technology in healthcare .
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