Healthcare, patients suffer from lack of coordination

Coordinated care has been heralded as the direct path to better and more cost-effective care, and financial rewards and penalties under the 2010 federal healthcare law are further driving care coordination. But, experts say communication failures that lead to inappropriate care are very common.

The problem is that no one is responsible for care coordination.

That lack of accountability for coordination contributes to the estimated 44,000 to 98,000 deaths per year from medical errors.

Stakeholders are working to improve care coordination. The Joint Commission developed a tool for hospitals to help guide communication when a patient is transferred from one hospital setting to another and some medical centers have taken steps to improve communication, assigning color-coded ID tags or scrubs to staff members so patients know who's a nurse and who's a doctor, and installing white boards in patient rooms, where a nurse starting a shift can jot down his or her name.