Designing Care Models to Treat High-Need, High-Cost Patients

 A recent report from the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) explored how healthcare organizations can identify high-need, high-cost patients and implement care models that appropriately address the needs of the population to reduce healthcare spending.

While high-need, high-cost patients only represent about 5 percent of all patients, their healthcare costs account for almost one-half of the nation’s healthcare spending.

Based on the discussions held in three workshops between July 2015 and October 2016, NAM researchers uncovered key characteristics of the patient population and ways for healthcare organizations to identify the patients within their systems.