By: Julie Stephens, Project Director
Comprehensive Health Assessment is a systematic, deliberative and interactive process by which healthcare professionals use critical and evidence-based thinking to collect, validate, analyze and synthesize the collected information in order to make judgments about the health status and life processes of individuals, families and communities.
In order to have a healthier community we must complete a health assessment on our patient population to be effective. It is extremely important to the community to identify gaps in the current knowledge base and encourage future research in these areas. Healthcare professionals tend to focus more narrowly on a medical model of health care such as a history and examination, followed by investigation and treatment, and finally clinical measures of successful outcome. When this occurs we must ask ourselves “Has a health need been met for the community? Was the care plan successful? Is the community healthier?
The Patient-Centered Medical Home model (PCMH) recognizes the importance of the perspective community in health care and the inter-relationships among health needs, satisfaction, and quality of life. Patients with a particular health status have more social needs, thus meeting a direct impact on general health status, which eventually falls into the health domain. Patients may have a need for more or better information on some aspect of health. The better informed patient tends to have higher expectations, are more likely to comply with treatment, take an active role in their own care, continue using medical care services and stay within a health provider. In addition, health expenditure may be optimized by conducting a comprehensive health assessment for the community.
Health assessment tools have the potential to identify specific and general health needs of the community. These tools are more likely to be associated with specific care needs. Measuring quality of life as a community provides insight towards approaches that may lead to improved care. These specific tools manage a screening test to identify communities guarantee a more comprehensive health assessment.
Please contact Julie Stephens, Project Director, to find out more about how Comprehensive Health Assessments can impact your PCMH application.