Bone and Joint Health for Life: CBJH Development & Partnerships
We know that bone and joint health is critical to maintaining mobility.
To stay active and engage in life fully for as long as possible, patients, providers, and the community alike must be aware of the importance of preventing and treating chronic conditions like arthritis and osteoporosis.
These issues are also of particular urgency because of the disparities in bone and joint health across gender, racial and socioeconomic lines, among others.
By personalizing the care experience to better meet the particular needs of each patient, we believe that we can begin to reduce musculoskeletal disparities and promote improved health and wellness for all people.
Exemplifying this belief is the new Center for Bone and Joint Health at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital. By pulling together providers, resources, and services that better meet patients’ personal and specific needs, the Center is addressing the crisis threatening to disable a significant portion of the US population and that‘s placing growing, burdensome costs on the healthcare system.
The following examples of the Center for Bone & Joint Health’s early programs and projects show the various ways that our teams are innovating in many areas of health to guide patients along in their personal journey to wellness.
CREATING A PERSONALIZED CARE PROGRAM
Every single patient is unique. Care should be custom-fit for each patient, not the other way around. To continue developing our newest program at the Center for Bone & Joint Health (CBJH), we coupled person-centered design strategies with evidence from the literature to improve care experiences while reducing disparities.
That combination helped us immediately locate priorities for patients, including weight management, nutrition, and physical activity guidance. We learned from patients that oftentimes lifestyle factors like social support systems, levels of motivation, time constraints, and others made taking care of one’s own health fall further down the priority list.
To begin addressing this identified need, we built several touchpoints into our care pathway focused on listening to patients so that we can understand their needs. For example, upon signing up for the program, one of the first visits is an hour-long phone call with a clinical coordinator, where they discuss what patients are most concerned about or interested in.
During that call, patients can share thoughts about what matters most in their lives so that their treatment plan can be developed accordingly. For instance, some patients express interest in losing weight first and foremost, whereas others want to increase their mobility and physical activity or learn how to eat more healthily. Each patient’s unique lineup of priorities helps the Clinical Coordinators determine how to approach the treatment plan.
Additionally, the Clinical Coordinators use Motivational Interviewing techniques to assess each person’s readiness to change. By garnering this information early on, the interventions can be structured in stair-step fashion that meet the patient where they are currently while also providing an incremental path forward.
More personalized care also begins to address and reduce disparities along the lines of gender, socioeconomic, ethnic, and cultural considerations in bone and joint health. With unique collaborations between integrated care teams of providers driven by a mission to personalize care, the Center for Bone and Joint Health approach is an innovative and adaptable model. It empowers everyone to take charge of their journey to wellness by co-designing better care experiences for all while reducing known disparities.