This Research Topic debuted in 2016 under the title
The Role of Financing, Delivery & Policy Innovations in Decreasing Chronic Disease Burdens, and has been well received and widely read. In this new Research Topic for 2020, we aim to reprise and refresh the topic of Innovations in Chronic Disease Care, with a renewed focus on Value-Based and other models of improved care delivery and payment.
The morbidity and mortality caused by chronic diseases increasingly dominates the global burden of disease. Prevention and treatment of these chronic conditions, such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, pulmonary conditions, requires the involvement of various formal provider organizations in primary care, specialists and hospitals, as well as of informal care givers. This Research Topic focuses on improvement of health service networks, value-based payment arrangements, and health policies to prevent or more effectively treat chronic diseases. Such improvements may take the form of policy improvements (including financing, regulation, or otherwise), payment and insurance schemes (e.g. insurance, managed care, direct contracting, accountable care, value-based designs), and of interventions in service delivery (care coordination, care processes across organizations, information systems, communication, sharing of resources, etc). Often the most effective improvements involve multi-faceted interventions.
The goal of this Research Topic is to advance the evidence base on effectiveness of interventions to improve the performance of networks servicing patients with chronic conditions, and value-based payment mechanisms aiming to improve outcomes and costs. The medical and health services literature often focuses on interventions addressing single provider organisations, episodes of the full chronic disease patient journey, and corresponding sub-processes. More integrated approaches involving multiple components of the networks remain scarce, especially research on approaches that include primary and/or secondary prevention. The prevention of onset, early-stage advancement, and subsequent complications and co-morbidities is necessary to manage the societal, organizational, and household-level costs of disease burden. This Research Topic specifically aims to advance the evidence base in these areas.
We broadly welcome studies proposing or reporting on novel interventions related to:
• Under-researched approaches to care for the chronically ill;
• Improving the performance of health service networks;
• Value-based payment and insurance arrangements;
• The needs of the chronically ill;
• Targeting population level interventions and outcomes;
• Population-based or value-based financing/payment;
• Networks offering services for screening, prevention, and early stage treatment in which costs often are low and the disease burden can still be better contained.
Moreover, we particularly welcome studies from contexts and countries in which resources are scarce, for instance covering the growing burden of disease in developing countries, or addressing patient populations in developed countries with limited resources or poor insurance coverage.
If a potential author is unsure about the fit of a paper with this Research Topic’s scope, please submit an extended abstract to any of the Topic Editors for a desk review.
