MANAGEABLE OFTEN
OVERLOOKED
Chronic disease treatment
will play a vital role in effective
population health efforts
Joe Morris
Contributing Writer
HealthStream
An oft-quoted statistic in healthcare
is that 20 percent of patients generate 80 percent of costs.
There’s some debate about those exact figures, but a hard truth is that one segment of the patient
population, those living with chronic conditions, do absorb a tremendous amount of healthcare providers’
time, attention, and resources. What makes finding success even more difficult is that our healthcare
system was developed with a focus on “a young, working population with episodic injuries or
infrequent infections, not seniors with multiple, complex, and chronic conditions” (Beveridge, 2018)
whose care needs are more commonly met across the non-hospital care continuum. Reflecting the
need for improved training resources, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
reported that an environmental scan of the care environment for people with multiple chronic
conditions performed by HHS in 2015 revealed “a paucity of evidence-based curricula to train the
workforce” (HHS, 2015) on addressing the unique and complex needs of this population.