This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related letter  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Aging/ Geriatrics  • Medical Practice  • Medical Practice, Other  • Quality of Care  • Quality of Care, Other  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In Reply: We agree with Dr Carmona that the most important message from our study is that it may be possible for care coordination programs to reduce hospitalizations and costs, and lessons can be learned from both the successful and the unsuccessful programs. The programs designed their own interventions and decided which chronic illnesses and severity levels to target. A key objective of the demonstration was to identify differences in the interventions and targeting that might explain any observed variation in effects. Our "Comment" section focused on these differences.

Our findings underscore that reducing the need for expensive hospitalizations among people with chronic illnesses is difficult. Successful programs must focus resources on patients at high short-term risk of hospitalizations (eg, within the next year) and should exhibit a number of critical features. Furthermore, success depends not only on incorporating appropriate intervention components but also on implementing them effectively. Many unsuccessful . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Randall Brown, PhD
rbrown@mathematica-mpr.com

Deborah Peikes, PhD; Arnold Chen, MD, MSc
Mathematica Policy Research Inc
Princeton, New Jersey

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED LETTER

Evaluating Care Coordination Among Medicare Beneficiaries
Richard H. Carmona
JAMA. 2009;301(24):2547-2548.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT